“Oh, I have approved of her—that's the trouble.”
Mrs. Maturin regarded him for a moment in silence.
“I wish you could have seen her when I began to read those verses of Stevenson's. It was an inspirations your thinking of them.”
“Did I think of them?”
“You know you did. You can't escape your responsibility. Well, I felt like—like a gambler, as though I were staking everything on a throw. And, after I began, as if I were playing on some rare instrument. She lay there, listening, without uttering a word, but somehow she seemed to be interpreting them for me, giving them a meaning and a beauty I hadn't imagined. Another time I told her about Silliston, and how this little community for over a century and a half had tried to keep its standard flying, to carry on the work begun by old Andrew, and I thought of those lines,
“Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.”
That particular application just suddenly, occurred to me, but she inspired it.”
“You're a born schoolma'am,” Insall laughed.
“I'm much too radical for a schoolmam,” she declared. “No board of trustees would put up with me—not even Silliston's! We've kept the faith, but we do move slowly, Brooks. Even tradition grows, and sometimes our blindness here to changes, to modern, scientific facts, fairly maddens me. I read her that poem of Moody's—you know it:—
'Here, where the moors stretch free
In the high blue afternoon,
Are the marching sun and the talking sea.'