"And I've missed my apprenticeship!" said Desire, with changed voice and face, falling back into her disheartenment again.
"No!" Uncle Oldways almost shouted. "Not if you come to the Master who takes in the eleventh hour workers. And it isn't the eleventh hour with you,--_child_!"
He dwelt on that word "child," reminding her of her short mistaking and of the long retrieval. Her nineteen years and the forever and ever contrasted themselves before her suddenly, in the light of hope.
She turned sharply, though, to look at her duty. Her journeyman's duty of easy things.
"Must I go to Europe with my mother?" she asked again, the conversation coming round to just that with which it had begun.
"I'll talk with your mother," said Uncle Oldways, getting up and looking into his hat, as a man always does when he thinks of putting it on presently. "Good-night. I suppose you are tired enough now. I'll come again and see you."
"I thank you, Uncle Titus, with all my heart."
He did not answer her a word; but he knew she meant it.
He did not stop that night to see his niece. He went home, to think it over. But as he walked down Borden Street, swinging his big stick, he said to himself,--
"Next of kin! Old Marmaduke Wharne was right. But it takes more than the Family Bible to tell you which it is!"
Two days after, he had a talk with Mrs. Ledwith which relieved both their minds.
From the brown-and-apricot drawing-room,--from among the things that stood for nothing now, and had never stood for home,--he went straight up, without asking, and knocked at Desire's third-story door.
"Come in!" she said, without a note of expectation in her voice.
She had had a dull morning. Helena had brought her a novel from Loring's that she could not read. Novels, any more than life, cannot be read with very much patience, unless they touch something besides surface. Why do critics--some of them--make such short, smart work,--such cheerful, confident despatch, nowadays, of a story with religion in it, as if it were an abnormity,--a thing with sentence of death in itself, like a calf born with two heads,--that needs not their trouble, save to name it as it is? Why, that is, if religion stand for the relation of things to spirit, which I suppose it should? Somebody said that somebody had written a book made up of "spiritual struggles and strawberry short-cake." That was bright and funny; and it seemed to settle the matter; but, taking strawberry short-cake representatively, what else is human experience on earth made up of? And are novels to be pictures of human experience, or not?