“This room is full of Philip and Cousin Ralph,” Sarepta had said; “his picture is but one of the things in it and in this house to remind me of Cousin Ralph.”
“Sarepta breathes Philip,” her mother replied.
“We are twin spirits like Blaise and Jacqueline Pascal. Do you know about them, Tessa?”
“I know that he was a monk and she a nun.”
“That is like me, and not like Philip,” said Miss Sarepta; “he shall not be a monk because I am a nun!”
“His wife will be jealous enough of you, though,” said Mrs. Towne; “not a mail comes that he does not send you something. How would she like that?”
“Philip could not love any one that would come between us. Tessa, do you admire my brother as much as I wish you to do?”
“I admire him exceedingly,” said Tessa, looking up from her twenty-fifth block of the basket quilt; “he is my ideal. I knew that I had found my ideal as soon as I saw him; I did not wait to hear him speak.”
And that he was her ideal she became more and more assured, for in February he spent a week at home and she had opportunity to study him at all hours and in any hour of the day. He had lost his fancied resemblance to Dr. Towne, or _she_ had lost it in thinking of him as only himself. The long talks, during which she sat, at Miss Sarepta’s side, on a foot cushion, work in hand, the basket blocks, or some more fanciful work for Miss Sarepta, she remembered afterward as one of the times in her life in which she _grew_. She told Miss Sarepta that she and her brother were like the men and women that St. Paul in his Epistles sent his love to. “He ought to marry a saint like Madame Guyon; I think that it would be easier to revere him as a saint than to marry him. I can’t imagine any woman forgiving him, or loving him because he _needs_ her love; he stands so far above me, I could never think of him as at my side and sometimes saying, ‘Help me, Tessa,’ or, ‘What do _you_ think?’”
“Now we know your ideal of marriage,” laughed Mrs. Towne. “Philip is a good boy, but he sometimes needs looking after.”
“And other things, too. He is forgetful, and he’s rather careless. How much he is taken up with that reading class!”
“In a monkish way,” smiled Miss Sarepta. “He was full of enthusiasm about Ralph, too, mother.”