“I like to think that sweet little girl is you.”
“Then it _is_ me; I’ve grown sweet in a hurry,” Judith laughed, “and left all my tempers and tantrums far behind.”
“There’s another T to go with them—_temptations_—through which you grow strong.”
Not seeming to heed, but in reality holding her mother’s thought in her heart Judith ran merrily on: “And I see a church, with a little green in front, and posts to hitch the horses, the two church doors are wide open, for in the picture it is Sunday morning; Aunt Rody is in the head of a pew in the body of the church, and Aunt Affy sits next, and Uncle Cephas is next the door, and there’s a girl between Aunt Affy and Uncle Cephas, a girl fifteen years old and her hair is braided, not in long, babyish curls—”
“Oh, my little girl, wear your curls as long as you can, because mother loves them,” her mother urged, bending forward to touch the soft, bright hair.
“Then her hair _is_ curled, and she is trying to be good and listen. Perhaps she likes sermons—she looks so; in the picture the sermon is like the Bible stories you tell me when we read together—I _wish_ ministers told Bible stories. And there’s the sweetest singing; it is like Marion Kenney’s singing; she sings like a bird, Don says; there are girls and boys all over the church, for the minister in the picture knows how to tell Bible stories to boys and girls and make them as real as the people and things in Summer Avenue and Bensalem; just as naughty and just as good. Jean Draper is there—in the pew behind me. Why, mother,” bringing herself back to the present and turning to look into her mother’s face, “Jean Draper was never in the steam cars, or on a ferry-boat in all her life—she has never been in New York or any where, only to Dunellen, which they call ‘town,’ and she walks there, or rides with her father. She wants to go somewhere as much as I want to go to boarding-school. It’s the dream of her life, as boarding-school is my dream.”
“Aunt Affy and Cousin Don will decide about boarding-school. Cousin Don and I have talked about it, and I will tell Aunt Affy what I think about it,” her mother decided with an unusual touch of firmness.
“But I wouldn’t leave _you_, mother, for all the boarding-schools in the world.”