"You will succeed," he said. "Undoubtedly you will succeed."
Still I felt no resentment. A gentle, sorrowful perplexity filled my breast.
"Why, do—I—look—very—very—unusual, John?" I questioned, and looking in his face I wondered why, in the old days of careless jest and repartee, he had never seemed so moved.
More words he said, but I could not bear them then, and tears from an inward pain fell on the cedar spray, yet I was glad that I had not grown so unusual that people would never like me any more.
Next, the surprise was a success, as John Cable had predicted, but that was the one point in my career in which my genius had never failed me. My surprises, though inclined to take something of the nature of an accumulation of calamities, had never lacked the great element of awe-producing wonder.
For the rest, I had known that I should be forgiven and received with the usual éclât of the returned prodigal into the family bosom—but to be held up on successive days as an object of ever-increasing marvel and interest, as one whose words and acts were endowed with a peculiar significance, as the light of the social fireside, the enchanter of small spell-bound audiences! Well, I had been spoiled so early in life that little was needed to complete the wreck. I felt a deeper satisfaction when, as I was meekly beseeching our Bridget's instruction in some particular branch of the culinary art, that majestic female observed, as she folded her arms and looked down on me complacently:—
"There's one thing I like better about you than I used to, miss—you do have to wade through a great deal o' flour to larn a little plain cooking but Job himself couldn't a' be'n no patienter." And it was indeed true that my "Graham gems" never quite reached perfection, though they bore with them marks of earnest and faithful endeavor.
I found new sources of interest everywhere, and in ways which I had formerly regarded with aversion and disdain.
At the "Newtown Ladies' Charitable Sewing Society," I was elevated from among the common stitchers and sewers, for faithfulness in service,—I believe, though malicious fingers would point to the distortion of the legs of little heathens' trousers—to a place on the "cutting circle." From the cutting circle, it is needless to say, I was speedily exalted to a presidential chair of easeful observation and general vague superintendency.
Later, there was a revival of the "Literary Club." There John Cable and I shone once more amid a group of familiar and undimmed luminaries. John Cable never took up the exact thread of the discourse broken off so abruptly on the day of my return, in the cars, but it was when coming home from the club one evening that he expressed himself to the effect that I had always been a great burden on his mind, ever since the first day he led me to school, and, to be sure, I had shown signs of improvement lately, but there was always a pardonable doubt as to what I might do next, and it was wearing on him, and would I set his mind at rest by allowing him, in some sense, to take the direction of my life into his own hands?