The brave words Jeb uttered were most agreeable to his senses; they fed the hole that should have been filled with courage, and he therefore plunged onward into the realm of imageries until the little ladies felt that they had never really known their Jeb. Certain were they that his manliness had received a most inadequate appreciation.
Dinner over, he left them for the quietude of the garden. Back and forth upon the path, bordered by wee budding tulips, he walked with springing steps. His gaze was in the laced branches overhead, a tangle that broke the calm flood of moonlight into silver patches and scattered them over the ground. Back and forth across these he strode--one moment in sharp outline, the next obscured--thinking, dreaming. He would not stop to hear the unspoken message of this place, whispering to him everywhere that the intricate mesh of branches represented Fear, through which the pulseless courage shed upon man from God is shattered. He would not see, in the tiny green tips pushing through the earth, that man's blooming into perfection is a slow process, dependent upon the cultivation of his soul. In this night of his greatest promise, he asked only to live with dreams.
The soil surrounding Jeb's progress thus far in life had been prepared by his two adoring aunts with very much the same care they bestowed on their tulips. After he was put into their hands at the age of four, neither their time, nor thought, nor means were spared in forcing his development. But while Miss Sallie and Miss Veemie could intensify the development of a tulip, it might not be said that they knew anything about boys. To a critical eye--had it watched Jeb now walking this way and that as a restive animal--the fruit of their labor would without doubt have been pronounced satisfactory; yet only in a visual sense could he have been called animal. So far as concerned temperament he was merely a fretful peri locked up in a cage of flowers--for how in the name of all creation had it been possible for Miss Sallie and Miss Veemie, sole proprietresses of this male machine, to make him properly masculine!
Within the dining-room there were no dreams. As he had passed out, the little ladies remained silent for several minutes. Slowly Miss Sallie raised her eyes and looked at her sister, then sharply exclaimed: