“Yes; I cannot think of a better word. It seemed to me as though I had known him ages ago, in some other world, such as the Pythagoreans imagined, and that I, bright and young and happy, meeting him again, I, though I saw he was unhappy, cruelly passed him by! Oh, Mr. Whacker, I do pity him so!”
Her lower lip trembled, and her soft brown eyes glistened with rising tears. For a while neither of us spoke,—she, perhaps, afraid to trust her voice, I respecting her emotion by silence.
“Yes,” said I, at length, “it is an old story. ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’ We cannot help, though we would, feeling the sorrows of others. But, Miss Lucy, aren’t you letting your imagination—no, your tender-heartedness—run away with your judgment? Here is a great, strapping, fine-looking fellow, whom you have seen passing along the street a few times, with a rather serious expression of countenance, and you straightway jump to the conclusion that he is profoundly miserable, and even shed tears over his fate.”
“Yes, it is all very silly, of course,” said she, smiling, and brushing away her tears.
“And you must admit that you have not a particle of evidence, not a scintilla, as we lawyers say, that the Don is any more to be pitied than I, or any other person of your acquaintance.”
“Oh, a woman’s rules of evidence are very different from what you lawyers find in your great, dusty, dull volumes. See how I should state the case. I see a great, strapping, fine-looking fellow, to borrow your language, coming here, day after day, from I know not how far, or at how great inconvenience to himself, with no other object, so far as I can divine, save that of enjoying the affectionate greetings of a little child of less than four years of age, whom he met by chance, and who, though nothing to him, in one sense seems everything to him, in that her childish love has gone out to him. What kind of a home must this man have, do you think? He can have no home. And yet you wonder that I am sorry for him!”
“No,” said I, gladly seizing the opportunity of changing the current of her thoughts; “it is true that the views you hold of evidence do not coincide with those of Greenleaf; but I have long since ceased to wonder at your feeling sorry for anybody or anything. The number of kettles that, of my certain knowledge, have, through your intercession, not been tied to stray dogs’ tails, and the hosts of cats that have escaped twine cravats—”
“How cruel you boys used to be!”
“Why, Lucy, how long have you been there?” cried Alice, leaning out of the window. “Come here, Mary, and look at them,—it is a clear case. Laura,” added she, looking back into the parlor, but speaking loud enough for us to hear,—“Laura, for one so juvenile, your diagnosis is singularly accurate.”
“H’m? Whose noses?” asked Laura, looking up from the doll she was dressing.