"Really?" said he. "Perhaps I ought to go home and take care of my twelve hundred people at Vincennes. Is that your thought?"
"Are they in need of care?" I asked.
" 'Pon my word, I don't know. Perhaps it would be nearer right to say, take care of myself; for if the war should come the way of Vicksburg, and Yankee arms have a little success, there might be the mischief to pay at Vincennes. On reflection, I don't see how I could take care of myself, either. Then you do not bid me go?" he asked again.
"You remember our words one day about insignificant lives?"
"Yes!" he cried eagerly; "and I have been longing ever since to ask you to explain more fully what interested me so much. I never could get a chance. I assure you, I have felt to the bottom of my heart what it is to have one's existence really worth nothing, to anybody. How may it be better? My life has to do with nothing but insignificant things."
"But you must define insignificance," I said.
"Is it needful?"
"I think so. What makes things insignificant? Not their being small, - or common?"
"What then, Miss Randolph?"
"Small things, and common things, are often to the last degree important, you know, Mr. Marshall."