“But Loveday in the city! My mind fails to grasp the idea. It’s as if one of the old barn owls had preened his rusty feathers and taken a daytime flight into the world,” said Octavia. “What could have induced her to do it?”
“The owl or Loveday? Care for its young—devotion to some one of us.” I said, drawing upon my somewhat limited knowledge of owl and human nature for motives. And then my mind was suddenly illumined as by a flash of lightning.
The photograph of the horse! There had been a method in Loveday’s midnight madness. I wondered that I had not suspected before that her interest in it was in some way connected with Dave’s difficulty. Alf Reeder’s racer! What interest could Loveday have had in a race-horse except for some special reason?
I had fancied, in my sleepy stupidity, that she had cherished the photograph, and was having fancies about it, because Hiram had taken it. I thought she had tardily developed a pride in Hiram’s photography, and that that was the reason for her visit to Uncle Horace’s old carriage-house, where Hiram’s wagon was stored. But it must have been a more striking idea than that which had “ketched a holt” of Loveday “between midnight and sun-up”—“ketched a holt” so powerfully as to have driven her from her peaceful couch.
How dull I had been not to see it! And yet, now, as I walked along the crowded sidewalk, I racked my brains in vain to find out what the photograph could possibly mean, and what had brought Loveday to the city.
“I’m afraid that Evelyn isn’t altogether like a city girl,” meditated Octavia aloud. Her mind had already reverted to her book, and Loveday was forgotten. “I see, now, how I might have made her different.” She talked as if she had now had the benefit of several society seasons! “I’m afraid there is a good deal of Palmyra in her.”
“Well, Palmyra is what you know best,” I said, in my matter-of-fact way.
“A novel is a work of the imagination,” Octavia declared with dignity—and a suspicion of redness in her cheeks.
It was natural, perhaps, that she should not like to have hints given her by a maker of sage cheese!
But I had not meant to hint. I didn’t really understand, then, that people can better write what they know. I only didn’t see how they could possibly write anything else. But of course I knew that I hadn’t an imagination like Octavia’s.