"I wish I could say--half of what I'm thinking," she murmured, looking gratefully up at Mr. Huntington with moist eyes.
He merely smiled. "Or I wish that _I_ myself could, after a day like to-day," he answered after a time.
A kind of quiet settled down on the girls and they talked in low pitched voices, laughing only in a comfortable undertone while the sense of homelikeness and good feeling grew and grew and struck deeply into each heart, bringing those inner visions that belong to Thanksgiving day, but need just the right atmosphere to make them perfect.
Sixty separate groups of dear home people were being vividly pictured in that one great room, sixty different houses were suddenly mentally erected within that house. Ever and ever so many beloved voices were imagined right in among the murmuring _real_ voices of the friends about them.
And, contradictory as it may seem, keeping pace with their happy contentment in the moment went a big, aching, sweeping longing in each girl's mind for just one minute in mother's arms, one instant of her dear, real, understanding presence. And from under sixty pairs of lashes bright tear drops were fought back, while each girl, wrapped up in her own heart-ache, believed that she alone was experiencing anything like this and that the others were all as free from such homeward thoughts as they had been when screaming with laughter a few hours ago over the grinds in the dining-room.
Thus all our experiences we go through much more in common with the rest of mankind than we suppose. But this is especially so in school and college, where a great number of young people of the same age and of more or less the same station in life are placed in exactly similar environment. The same tears, the same laughter, the same desires and the same satisfactions all girls who have gone away to school have felt in varying degree. And now here sat this roomful of girls, each suffering in the same new and unexpected way at the same time and each believing her mental situation to be strangely different from anything ever experienced in the world before.
The spell had even affected Mrs. Forest, too, for when she rose to gather up her flock she gave a great sigh and spoke with a curious gentleness that the girls had never associated with her pompous tones.