Here is what one of the finest of the
world's teachers had to say about justice. Aspiration is at that
end. This little book is on the sad loveliness of Greek girls; and
the volume beside it is about the brief human chaplets that Horace
and some other Romans wore--and then trod on. Thus the long story
of light and shadow girdles the globe. If you were nothing but a
spirit, Anna, and could float in here some night, perhaps you would
see a mysterious radiance streaming upward from this shelf of books
like the northern lights from behind the world--starting no one
knows where, sweeping away we know not whither--search-light of the
mortal, turned on dark eternity."
She stood a little behind him and watched him in silence, hiding
her tenderness.
"If I were a book," she said thoughtlessly, "where should I be?"
He drew the fingers of one hand lingeringly across the New
Testament.
"Ah, now don't do that," she cried, "or you shall have no dinner.
Here, turn round! look at the dust! look at this cravat on one end!
look at these hands! March upstairs."
He laid his head over against hers.
"Stand up!" she exclaimed, and ran out of the room.
Some minutes later she came back and took a seat near the door.
There was flour on her elbow; and she held a spoon in her hand.
"Now you look like yourself," she said, regarding him with approval
as he sat reading before the bookcase. "I started to tell you what
Harriet told me."
He looked over the top of his book at her.
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