"You mad, mad, children!" she said. "You are mad. But you are very picturesque in your decisions, there's no denying that. He would probably be better cared for, more scientifically fed, and all that, in a good, hired, private family. But that's as you see it. Be mad, if you like—I'm here to watch over you!"
She had quite a nice tidy high point of view about it—but oh, it wasn't ours. It wasn't ours. We three—the Brother-man and Miss Clementina and me—we sort of hugged our own way. And the little chap he kept smiling, like he sort of hugged it too.
So that was the way it was. Miss Clementina and the Brother-man—that she'd been afraid to meet, 'count of thinking mebbe he didn't mean his writings for living—were in love from before they knew it. And I think it was part because they both meant life strong enough for living and not just for thinking, like the lukewarm folks do.
I kept the little chap with me the three months or so that went by before the wedding—and I could hardly bear to let him go then.
"Why don't you keep him for them the first year or so?" Friendship Village ask' me. But there's some things even your own town doesn't always understand. "It's so unromantic for them to take him now," some of them even said.
But I says to them what I say now: "There's things that's bigger than romantic and there's things that's bigger than practical, so be some of both is mixed in right proportion. And the biggest thing I know in this world is when folks say over, 'You and me and all of us,' like voices, speaking to everybody's Father from inside the dark."
FOOTNOTE:
[9] Copyright, 1913, The Delineator.