"Desire," said Hazel. "I've come for her. We're wanted at Luclarion's. We've got work to do."
"Play," said Hazel, laughing. She delighted to bother and mystify Uncle Titus, and imagined that she did.
"Something like," said Hazel. "There are children down there that don't know how to grow up. They haven't any comfortable sort of fashion of growing up. Somebody has got to teach them. They don't know how to play 'Grand Mufti,' and they never heard of 'King George and his troops.' Luclarion tried to make them sit still and learn letters; but of course they wouldn't a minute longer than the gingerbread lasted, and they are eating her out of house and home. It will take young folks, and week-days, you see; so Desire and I are going." And Hazel ran up the great, flat-stepped staircase.
"Lives that have no business to be," said Uncle Titus to himself, going down the brick walk. "The Lord has His own ways of bringing lives together. And His own business gets worked out among them, beyond their guessing. When a man grows old, he can stand still now and then, and see a little."
It was a short cross street that Luclarion lived in, between two great thoroughfares crowded with life and business, bustle, drudgery, idleness, and vice. You will not find the name I give it,--although you may find one that will remind you of it,--in any directory or on any city map. But you can find the places without the names; and if you go down there with the like errands in your heart, you will find the work, as she found it, to do.
She heard the noise of street brawls at night, voices of men and women quarreling in alley-ways, and up in wretched garrets; flinging up at each other, in horrible words, all the evil they knew of in each other's lives,--"away back," Luclarion said, "to when they were little children."
"And what is it," she would say to Mrs. Ripwinkley telling her about it, "that _flings_ it up, and can call it a shame, after all the shames of years and years? Except just _that_ that the little children _were_, underneath, when the Lord let them--He knows why--be born so? I tell you, ma'am, it's a mystery; and the nigher you come to it, the more it is; it's a piece of hell and a piece of heaven; it's the wrastle of the angel and the dragon; and it's going on at one end, while they're building up their palaces and living soft and sweet and clean at the other, with everything hushed up that can't at least _seem_ right and nice and proper. I know there's good folks there, in the palaces; _beautiful_ folks; there, and all the way down between; with God's love in them, and His hate, that is holy, against sin; and His pity, that is _prayers_ in them, for all people and places that are dark; but if they would _come down_ there, and take hold! I think it's them that would, that might have part in the first resurrection, and live and reign the thousand years."