“She is, in her small province,” replied Mrs. Lane. “I have something for her; I think I can help her step out into as wide a world as she cares to live in. No; don’t ask me; it is to be her secret and my own. Now, Judith, tell me, what is the secret of the happy and useful lives you know?”
“I don’t know,” replied Judith, truthfully. “But they are all married. I am thinking of girls—like me. Their work came to them.”
“As mine did,” said Jean, contentedly, with a glance from her work out the window where the blacksmith was shoeing a horse.
“No, she was not. She had her work. It was in her home. She was born among her work. But I have not a home like that,” Judith answered in short, sharp sentences.
“Why, Judith,” reproached Jean, “what would Aunt Affy say to that?”
“It would hurt her. She would look sorry. I do not know what gets into me, sometimes. She would adopt me and be like my own mother.”
“Do you resist such a sweet mothering as that?” rebuked Mrs. Lane. “I think I lost some of the sermon Sunday morning by looking at her face.”
“I do not mean to _resist_ her,” said Judith, not able to keep the tears back.
“She told mother her heart ached to have you back,” persuaded Jean, “since her sister died she had so longed for her little girl.”
“I’m afraid I am not doing right,” confessed Judith, “but I was almost homesick there, when Aunt Rody was sick. And then, I think I _must_ learn to support myself, and not be dependent.”
“And with Aunt Affy for your _mother_,” added Jean; “I told Mrs. Lane you had ideas.”
“I should think I had,” said Judith, laughing to keep the tears back. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten Aunt Affy. She loves two people in me, she says; my mother and me. I don’t know what _has_ possessed me.”
“Ambition, perhaps,” Mrs. Lane suggested, taking up her knitting,—a long black stocking for her only grandchild.
“Not just that,” Judith reasoned; “it is more making something of myself for myself. Culture for its own sake,” she quoted from Roger, who had warned her against her devotion to self-culture; “and I give it a self-sacrificing name; the desire to be independent. I do not know why I should _not_ be dependent on Aunt Affy. My mother was—and loved it.”
“No service could be more acceptable than serving her,” said Mrs. Lane; “the world is only a larger Bensalem.”