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CHAPTER XV

Suddenly all the town began to talk of the pride of Kate MacNeill. She took to wearing all her best on week-days; abandoned the kitchen window, and ruined an old-established trade in pay-night sweeties, that used to shower on her in threepenny packets at the start of every autumn when the days grew short. No longer blate young lads scraped with their feet uneasily in the sawdust of P. & A MacGlashan’s, swithering between the genteel attractions of Turkish Delight and the eloquence of conversation lozenges, that saved a lot of thinking, and made the blatest equal with the boldest when it came to tender badinage below the lamp at the back-door close with Dyce’s maid. Talk about the repartee of salons! wit moves deliberately there compared with the swift giff-gaff that Kate and her lads were used to maintain with sentiments doubly sweet and ready-made at threepence the quarter-pound. So fast the sweeties passed, like the thrust and riposte of rapiers, that their final purpose was forgotten; they were sweeties no longer to be eaten, but scented billets-doux, laconic of course, but otherwise just as satisfactory as those that high-born maidens get only one at a time and at long intervals when their papas are out at business.

“Are you engaged?”

“Just keep spierin’.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“You are a gay deceiver.”

“My heart is yours.”

“How are your poor feet?”

By the hour could Kate sustain such sparkling flirtations, or at least till a “Kiss me, dearest” turned up from the bottom of the poke, and then she slapped his face for him. It is the only answer out in Colonsay unless he’s your intended.

But it stopped all at once. P. & A. was beat to understand what way his pay-night drawings fell, until he saw that all the lads were taking the other side of the street. “That’s her off, anyway!” said he to Mrs P. & A., with a gloomy visage. “I wonder who’s the lucky man? It’s maybe Peter, – she’ll no’ get mony losengers from him.”

And it was not only the decline in votive offerings that showed the vital change; she was not at the Masons’ ball, which shows how wrong was the thought of P. & A., for Peter was there with another lady. Very cheery, too; exceedingly cheery, ah, desperately gay, but quite beyond the comprehension of his partner, Jenny Shand, who was unable to fathom why a spirit so merry in the hall should turn to groans and bitterness when, feeling a faintish turn, she got him in behind the draft-screen on the landing of the stair to sit the “Flowers o’ Edinburgh.” He was fidging fain to tell her plainly what he thought of all her sex, but strove like a perfect gentleman against the inclination, and only said “Ha! ha! do you say so, noo?” and “Weemen!” with a voice that made them all out nothing more nor less than vipers. Poor Jenny Shand! bonny Jenny Shand! what a shame she should be bothered with so ill-faured a fellow! When she was picking bits of nothing off his coat lapel, as if he was her married man, and then coming to herself with a pretty start and begging pardon for her liberty, the diffy paid no heed; his mind was down the town, and he was seeing himself yesterday morning at the first delivery getting the window of Dyce’s kitchen banged in his face when he started to talk about soap, meaning to work the topic round to hands and gloves. He had got the length of dirty hands, and asked the size of hers, when bang! the window went, and the Hielan’ one in among her pots and pans.

It was not any wonder, for other lads as deliberate and gawky as himself had bothered her all the week with the same demand. Hands! hands! you would think, said she, they were all at the door wi’ a bunch of finger-rings bound to marry her right or wrong, even if they had to put them on her nose. Of course she knew finely what they were after – she knew that each blate wooer wanted a partner for the ball, and could only clench the compact with a pair of gloves; but just at present she was not in trim for balls, and landsmen had no interest for her since her heart was on the brine. Some of them boldly guessed at seven-and-a-halfs without inquiry, and were dumfoundered that she would not look at them; and one had acquired a pair of roomy white cotton ones with elastic round the top – a kind of glove that plays a solemn part at burials, having come upon Miss Minto when her stock of festive kids was done. They waylaid Kate coming with her basket from the mangle – no, thanky, she was needing no assistance; or she would find them scratching at the window after dark; or hear them whistling, whistling, whistling – oh, so softly! – in the close. There are women rich and nobly born who think that they are fortunate, and yet, poor dears! they never heard the whistling in the close. Kate’s case was terrible! By day, in her walks abroad in her new merino, not standing so much as a wink, or paying any heed to a “Hey, Kate, what’s your hurry?” she would blast them with a flashing eye. By night, hearing their signals, she showed them what she thought of them by putting to the shutters. “Dir-r-rt!” was what she called them, with her nose held high and every “r” a rattle on the lug for them – this to Bud, who could not understand the new distaste Kate had to the other sex. “Just dirt below my feet! I think myself far far above them.”

One evening Mr Dyce came in from his office and quizzed her in the lobby. “Kate,” said he, “I’m not complaining, but I wish you would have mercy on my back-door. There’s not a night I have come home of late but if I look up the close I find a lad or two trying to bite his way into you through the door. Can you no’ go out, like a good lass, and talk at them in the Gaelic – it would serve them right! If you don’t, steps will have to be taken with a strong hand, as you say yourself. What are they wanting? Bless my soul! can this – can this be love?”

She ran to the sanctuary of the kitchen, plumped in a chair, and was swept away in a storm of laughter and tears that frightened Bud, who waited there a return of her aunts from the Women’s Guild. “Why, Kate, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“Your un – your un – un – uncle’s blaming me for harbouring all them chaps about the door, and says it’s l-l – love: oh dear! I’m black affronted.”

“You needn’t go into hysterics about a little thing like that,” said Bud; “Uncle Dan’s tickled to death to see so many beaux you have, wanting you to that ball; he said last night he had to walk between so many of them waiting for you there in front, it was like shassaying up the middle in the Haymakers.”

“It’s not hysterics, nor hersterics either,” said the maid; “and oh, I wish I was out of here and back in the isle of Colonsay!”

Yes, Colonsay became a great place then. America, where the prospects for domestics used to be so fascinating, had lost its glamour since Bud had told her the servants there were as discontented as in Scotland, and now her native isle beat Paradise. She would talk by the hour, at a washing, of its charms, of which the greatest seemed to be the absence of public lamps and the way you heard the wind! Colonsay seemed to be a place where folk were always happy, meeting in each other’s houses, dancing, singing, courting, marrying, getting money every now and then from sons or wealthy cousins in Australia. Bud wondered if they never did any work in Colonsay. Yes, yes, indeed! Kate could assure her, they worked quite often out in Colonsay – in the winter time.

But one thing greatly troubled her – she must write back at once to the only Charles, who so marvellously had come to her through Bud’s unconscious offices, and she knew she could never sustain the standard of hand-write, spelling, and information Bud had established in her first epistle. Her position was lamentable. It was all very well to be the haughty madam on the street, and show herself a wise-like modest gyurl, but what was that without the education? C. Maclean was a man of education – he got it on the yats among the gentry, he had travelled all the world!

Kate’s new airs, that caused such speculation in the town, were – now let me tell you – all the result of a dash at education. She wanted to be able to write a letter as good as Bud in a week or two, and had engaged the child to tutor her.

Bud never found a more delicious game in all her life, and it hurried her convalescence, for to play it properly she must be Aunt Ailie, and Aunt Ailie was always so strong and well.

“Education,” said Bud, who had a marvellous memory, and was now, you will notice, Ailie Dyce, sitting on a high chair, with the maid on a stool before her, – “education is not what a lot of sillies think it is; it isn’t knowing everything. Lots try for it that way, and if they don’t die young, just when they’re going to win the bursary, they grow up horrid bores, that nobody asks to picnics. You can’t know everything, not if you sit up cramming till the cows come home; and if you want to see a brainy person jump, ask him how his mother raised her dough. Miss Katherine MacNeill, never – NEVER – NEVER be ashamed of not knowing a thing, but always be ashamed of not wanting to know. That’s Part One. Don’t you think you should have an exercise-book, child, and take it down?”

“Toots! what’s my head for?” said the servant

“Uncle Dan says education is knowing what you don’t know, and knowing where to find it out without the other people knowing; but he says in most places you can get the name of having it fine and good by talking loud and pushing all your goods in front of you in a big enough barrow. And Auntie Bell – she says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and the rest of it is what she skipped at Barbara Mushet’s Seminary. But I tell you, child (said the echo of Ailie Dyce), that education’s just another name for love.”

“My stars! I never knew that before,” cried the servant; “I’m awful glad about Charles!”

“It isn’t that kind of love,” Bud hurriedly explained, “though it’s good enough, for that’s too easy. You’re only on the trail for education when you love things so you’ve simply got to learn as much as is good for your health about them. Everything’s sweet – oh, so sweet – all the different countries, and the different people, when you understand, and the woods, and the things in them, and all the animals, – ’cepting maybe puddocks, though it’s likely God made them too when He was kind of careless, – and the stars, and the things men did, and women, – ’specially those that’s dead, poor dears! – and all the books, ’cepting the stupid ones Aunt Ailie simply can’t stand, though she never lets on to the ladies who like that kind.”

“My Lord! must you love them all?” asked the maid, astonished.

“Yes, you must, my Lord,” said Bud. “You’ll never know the least thing well in this world unless you love it. It’s sometimes mighty hard, I allow. I hated the multiplication table, but now I love it – at least, I kind of love it up to seven times nine, and then it’s almost horrid, but not so horrid as it was before I knew that I would never have got to this place from Chicago unless a lot of men had learned the table up as far as twelve times twelve.”

“I’m not particular about the multiplication table,” said the maid, “but I want to be truly refined, the same as you said in yon letter to Charles. I know he’ll be expecting it.”

“H-m-m-m-m!” said Bud thoughtfully, “I s’pose I’ll have to ask Auntie Ailie about that, for I declare to goodness I don’t know where you get it, for it’s not in any of the books I’ve seen. She says it’s the One Thing in a lady, and it grows inside you someway, like – like – like your lungs, I guess. It’s no use trying to stick it on outside with lessons on the piano or the mandoline, and parlour talk about poetry, and speaking mim as if you had a clothes-pin in your mouth, and couldn’t say the least wee thing funny without it was a bit you’d see in ‘Life and Work.’ Refinement, some folk think, is not laughing right out.”

“My stars!” said Kate.

“And Auntie Bell says a lot think it’s not knowing any Scotch language and pretending you never took a tousy tea.”

“I think,” said Kate, “we’ll never mind refining; it’s an awful bother.”

“But every lady must be refined,” said Bud. “Ailie prosists in that.”

“I don’t care,” said the maid; “I’m not particular about being very much of a lady, – I’ll maybe never have the jewellery for it, – but I would like to be a sort of lady on the Sundays, when Charles is at home. I’m not hurryin’ you, my dear, but – but when do we start the writin’?” and she yawned in a way that said little for the interest of Professor Bud’s opening lecture.

Whereupon Bud explained that in a systematic course of education reading came first, and the best reading was Shakespeare, who was truly ennobling to the human mind. She brought in Auntie Ailie’s Shakespeare, and sat upon the fender, and plunged Kate at once into some queer society at Elsinore. But, bless you! nothing came of it: Kate fell asleep, and woke to find the fire cold and the child entranced with Hamlet.

“Oh dear! it’s a slow job getting your education,” she said pitifully, “and all this time there’s my dear Charles waiting for a letter!”

CHAPTER XVI

“I canna be bothered with that Shakespeare,” Kate cried hopelessly, after many days of him; “the man’s a mournin’ thing! Could he not give us something cheery, with ‘Come, all ye boys!’ in it, the same as the trawlers sing in Colonsay? There was far more fun last week in the penny Horner.”

So Bud dipped in the bottomless well of knowledge again and scooped up Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ and splashed her favourite lyrics at the servant’s feet. Kate could not stand the ‘Golden Treasury’ either; the songs were nearly all so lamentable they would make a body greet. Bud assured her on the best authority that the sweetest songs were those that told of saddest thought, but Kate said that might be right enough for gentry who had no real troubles of their own, but they weren’t the thing at all for working folk. What working folk required were songs with tunes to them, and choruses that you could tramp time to with your feet. History, too, was as little to her taste; it was all incredible, – the country could never have kept up so many kings and queens. But she liked geography, for the map enabled her to keep an eye on Charles as he went from port to port, where letters in her name, but still the work of Lennox, would be waiting for him.

The scheme of education was maintained so long because the town had come upon its melancholy days and Bud began to feel depression, so that playing teacher was her only joy. The strangers had gone south with the swallows; the steamer no longer called each day to make the pavement noisy in the afternoon with the skliff of city feet, so different from the customary tread of tackety boots; the coachman’s horn, departing, no longer sounded down the valley like a brassy challenge from the wide, wide world. Peace came to the burgh like a swoon, and all its days were pensive. Folk went about their tasks reluctant, the very smoke of the chimneys loitered lazily round the ridges where the starlings chattered, and a haze was almost ever over the hills. When it rose, sometimes, Bud, from her attic window, could see the road that wound through the distant glen. The road! – the road! – ah, that began to have a meaning and a kind of cry, and wishfully she looked at it and thought upon its other end, where the life she had left and read about was loudly humming and marvellous things were being done. Charles Maclean of Oronsay, second mate, whom she loved unto destruction, now that he was writing regularly, fairly daft himself to get such charming curious letters as he thought from Kate, had been adjusted by the doctor, and was once again on the heaving main. It would be Cardiff or Fleetwood, Hamburg, Santander, or Bilbao, whose very name is like a story, and his tarry pen, infected by the child’s example, induced to emulation, always bravely sought to give some picture of the varied world through which he wandered. Of noisy ports did he communicate, crowded with ships, of streets and lofty warehouses, and places where men sang, and sometimes of the playhouse, where the villain was a bad one and the women were so braw.

“What is braw?” asked Bud.

“It’s fine clothes,” said Kate; “but what’s fine clothes if you are not pure in heart and have a figure?” and she surveyed with satisfaction her own plump arms.

But the child guessed at a wider meaning for the word as Charles used it, and thought upon the beauteous clever women of the plays that she had seen herself in far Chicago, and since her vicarious lover would have thought them braw and plainly interesting, she longed to emulate them, at least to see them again. And, oh! to see the places that he wrote of, and hear the thundering wheels and jangling bells! And there was also Auntie Ailie’s constant stimulus to thoughts and aspirations that could meet no satisfaction in this little town. Bell dwelt continually within the narrow walls of her immediate duty, content, like many, thank the Lord! doing her daily turns as best she could, dreaming of nothing nobler. Dan had ranged wider in his time, and knew the world a great deal better, and had seen so much of it was illusion, its prizes “Will-o’-the-wisp,” that now his wild geese were come home. He could see the world in the looking-glass in which he shaved, and there was much to be amused at. But Ailie’s geese were still flying far across the firmament, knowing no place of rest. The child had bewitched her! it was often the distant view for her now, the region unattainable; and though apparently she had long ago surrendered to her circumstances, she now would sometimes silently irk at her prisoning here, in sleep-town, where we let things slide until to-morrow, while the wild birds of her inclination flew around the habitable wakeful world. Unwittingly – no, not unwittingly always – she charged the child with curiosity unsatisfiable, and secret discontent at little things and narrow, with longings for spacious arenas and ecstatic crowded hours. To be clever, to be brave and daring, to venture and make a glorious name! – how her face would glow and all her flesh would quiver picturing lives she would have liked to live if only she had had the chance! How many women are like that! silent by the hearth, seemingly placid and content as they darn and mend and wait on the whim and call of dullards.

Bell might be content and busy with small affairs, but she had a quick, shrewd eye, and saw the child’s unrest. It brought her real distress, for so had the roving spirit started in her brother William. Sometimes she softly scolded Lennox, and even had contemplated turning her into some other room from the attic that had the only window in the house from which the highroad could be seen, but Ailie told her that would be to make the road more interesting for the child. “And I don’t know,” she added, “that it should worry us if she does indulge herself in dreams about the great big world and its possibilities. I suppose she’ll have to take the road some day.”

“Take the road!” cried Bell, almost weeping. “Are you daft, Ailie Dyce? What need she take the road for? There’s plenty to do here, and I’m sure she’ll never be better off anywhere else. A lot of nonsense! I hope you are not putting notions in her head; we had plenty of trouble with her father.”

“It would break my heart to lose her, I assure you,” said Aunt Ailie softly; “but – ” and she ended with a sigh.

“I’m sure you’re content enough yourself?” said Bell; “and you’re not by any means a diffy.”

“Indeed I am content,” admitted Ailie; “at least – at least I’m not complaining. But there is a discontent that’s almost holy, a roving mood that’s the salvation of the race. There were, you mind, the Pilgrim Fathers – ”

“I wish to the Lord they had bided at home!” cried Bell. “There’s never been happy homes in this Christian land since they started emigration.” And at that Miss Ailie smiled and Dan began to chuckle.

“Does it not occur to you, Bell,” said he, “that but for the Pilgrim Fathers there would never have been Bud?”

“I declare neither there would!” she said, smiling. “Perhaps it was as well they went, poor things! And, of course, there must be many an honest decent body in America.”

“Quite a number!” said Ailie. “You would not expect this burgh to hold them all, or even Scotland: America’s glad to get the overflow.”

“Ah, you’re trying to make me laugh, the pair of you, and forget my argument,” said Bell; “but I’ll not be carried away this time. I’m feared for the bairn, and that’s telling you. Oh, Ailie, mind what her mother was – poor girl! poor dear girl! playacting for her living, roving from place to place, with nothing you could call a home; laughing and greeting and posturing before lights for the diversion of the world – ”

“We might do worse than give the world diversion,” said Ailie soberly.

“Yes, yes; but with a painted face and all a vain profession – that is different, is it not? I love a jovial heart like Dan’s, but to make the body just a kind of fiddle! It’s only in the body we can be ourselves – it is our only home; think of furnishing it with shams, and lighting every room that should be private, and leaving up the blinds that the world may look in at a penny a-head! How often have I thought of William, weeping for a living, as he had to do sometimes, no doubt, and wondered what was left for him to do to ease his grief when Mary died. Oh, curb the child, Ailie! curb the dear wee lassie, – it’s you it all depends on; she worships you; the making of her ’s in your hands. Keep her humble. Keep her from thinking of worldly glories. Teach her to number her days, that she may apply her heart unto wisdom. Her mind’s too often out of here and wandering elsewhere: it was so with William, – it was once the same with you.”

Indeed it was no wonder that Bud’s mind should wander elsewhere, since the life about her had grown so suddenly dull. In these days Wanton Wully often let his morning sleep too long possess him, and hurrying through the deserted dawn with his breeches scarcely on, would ring the bell in a hasty fury half an hour behind the proper time. But a little lateness did not matter in a town that really never woke. Men went to work in what we call a dover – that is, half asleep; shopkeepers came blinking drowsily down and took their shutters off, and went back to breakfast, or, I fear sometimes, to bed, and when the day was aired and decency demanded that they should make some pretence at business, they stood by the hour at their shop doors looking at the sparrows, wagtails, and blue-bonnets pecking in the street, or at the gulls that quarrelled in the syver sand. Nothing doing. Two or three times a-day a cart from the country rumbled down the town, breaking the Sabbath calm; and on one memorable afternoon there came a dark Italian with an organ who must have thought that this at last was Eldorado, so great was his reward from a community sick of looking at each other. But otherwise nothing doing, not a thing! As in the dark of the fabled underland the men who are blind are kings, George Jordon, the silly man, who never had a purpose, and carried about with him an enviable eternal dream, seemed in that listless world the only wide-awake, for he at least kept moving, slouching somewhere, sure there was work for him to do if only he could get at it. Bairns dawdled to the schools, dogs slept in the track where once was summer traffic; Kate, melancholy, billowed from the kitchen window, and into the street quite shamelessly sang sad old Gaelic songs which Mr Dyce would say would have been excellent if only they were put to music, and her voice was like a lullaby.

One day Bud saw great bands of countless birds depart, passing above the highroad, and standing in the withering garden heard as it were without a breath of wind the dry rattle of dead leaves fall. It frightened her. She came quickly in to the tea-table, almost at her tears.

“Oh, it’s dre’ffle,” she said. “It’s Sunday all the time, without good clothes and the gigot of mutton for dinner. I declare I want to yell.”

“Dear me!” said Miss Bell cheerfully, “I was just thinking things were unusually lively for the time of year. There’s something startling every other day. Aggie Williams found her fine new kitchen-range too big for the accommodation, and she has covered it with cretonne and made it into a what-not for her parlour. Then there’s the cantata – I hear the U.P. choir is going to start to practise it whenever Duncan Gill, next door to the hall, is gone: he’s near his end, poor body! they’re waiting on, but he says he could never die a Christian death if he had to listen to them at their operatics through the wall.”

“It’s not a bit like this in Chicago,” said the child, and her uncle chuckled.

“I daresay not,” said he. “What a pity for Chicago! Are you wearying for Chicago, lassie?”

“No,” said Bud, deliberating. “It was pretty smelly, but my! I wish to goodness folk here had a little git-up-and-go to them!”

“Indeed, I daresay it’s not a bit like Chicago,” admitted Auntie Bell. “It pleases myself that it’s just like Bonnie Scotland.”

“It’s not a bit like Scotland either,” said Bud. “I calc’lated Scotland ’d be like a story-book all the time, chock-full of men-at-arms and Covenanters, and things father used to talk about, Sundays, when he was kind of mopish, and wanted to make me Scotch. I’ve searched the woods for Covenanters and can’t find one; they must have taken to the tall timber, and I haven’t seen any men-at-arms since I landed, ’cepting the empty ones up in the castle lobby.”

“What did you think Scotland would be like, dear?” asked Ailie.

“Between me and Winifred Wallace, we figured it would be a great place for chivalry and constant trouble among the crowned heads. I expected there’d be a lot of ‘battles long ago,’ same as in the Highland Reaper in the sweet, sweet G.T.”

“What’s G.T.?” asked Auntie Bell; and Bud laughed slyly, and looked at her smiling Auntie Ailie, and said: “We know, Auntie Ailie, don’t we? It’s GRAND! And if you want to know, Auntie Bell, it’s just Mister Lovely Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury.’ That’s a book, my Lord! I expected there’d be battles every day – ”

“What a bloodthirsty child!” said Miss Ailie.

“I don’t mean truly truly battles,” Bud hurried to explain, “but the kind that’s the same as a sound of revelry off – no blood, but just a lot of bang. But I s’pose battles are gone out, like iron suits. Then I thought there’d be almost nothing but cataracts and ravines and – and – mountain-passes, and here and there a right smart Alick in short trunks and a feather in his hat, winding a hunting-horn. I used to think, when I was a little, wee, silly whitterick, that you wound a horn every Saturday night with a key, just like a clock; but I’ve known for years and years it’s just blowing. The way father said, and from the things I read, I calc’lated all the folk in Scotland ’d hate each other like poison, and start a clan, and go out chasing all the other clans with direful slogans and bagpipes skirling wildly in the genial breeze. And the place would be crowded with lovelorn maidens – that kind with the starched millstones round their necks, like Queen Mary always wore. My, it must have been rough on dear old Mary when she fell asleep in church! But it’s not a bit like that; it’s only like Scotland when I’m in bed, and the wind is loud, and I hear the geese. Then I think of the trees all standing out in the dark and wet, and the hills too, the way they’ve done for years and years, and the big lonely places with nobody in them, not a light even; and I get the croodles and the creeps, for that’s Scotland, full of bogies. I think Scotland’s stone-dead.”

“It’s no more dead than you are yourself,” said Miss Bell, determined ever to uphold her native land. “The cleverest people in the world come from Scotland.”

“So father used to say; but Jim, he said he guessed the cleverer they were the quicker they came. I’m not a bit surprised they make a dash from home when they feel so dead and mopish and think of things and see that road.”

“Road?” said Uncle Dan. “What road?”

“My road,” said the child. “The one I see from my window: oh, how it rises and rises and winds and winds, and it just shrieks on you to come right along and try.”

“Try what?” asked her uncle curiously.

“I dunno,” said Bud, thinking hard; “Auntie Ailie knows, and I ’spect Auntie Bell knows too. I can’t tell what it is, but I fairly tickle to take a walk along. Other times I feel I’d be mighty afraid to go, but Auntie Ailie says you should always do the things you’re afraid to do, for they’re most always the only things worth doing.”

Mr Dyce, scratching the ear of Footles, who begged at the side of his chair, looked over the rims of his glasses and scrutinised the child.

“All roads,” said he, “as you’ll find a little later, come to the same dead end, and most of us, though we think we’re picking our way, are all the time at the mercy of the Schoolmaster, like Geordie Jordon. The only thing that’s plain in the present issue is that we’re not brisk enough here for Young America. What do you think we should do to make things lively?”

“Hustle,” said Bud. “Why, nobody here moves faster’n a funeral, and they ought to gallop if they want to keep up with the band.”

“I’m not in a hurry myself,” said her uncle, smiling. “Maybe that’s because I think I’m all the band there is, myself. But if you want to introduce the Chicago system you should start with Mrs Wright’s Italian warehouse down the street, – the poor body’s losing money trying to run her shop on philanthropic principles.”

Bud thought hard a while. “Phil – phil – What’s a philanthropic principle?” she asked.

“It’s a principle on which you don’t expect much interest except in another world,” said her uncle. “The widow’s what they call a Pilgrim, hereabouts; if the meek were to inherit the earth in a literal sense, she would long ago have owned the whole county.”