Kit of Greenacre Farm | Page 8

within them the surge of--of----"
"Don't declaim in the family circle, Kit. We admit the surge, but would you really and truly be willing to go to this place? I don't even know what state it's in."
"The Lady Jean is forgetful of her mythology," chanted Kit. "Delphi is in Greece, somewhere near Delos, and I don't think it's so very far from the grove where Atalanta took refuge before she ran her races."
Helen glanced up in her absent-minded way.
"Delphi?" she said, musingly. "Wasn't that the place where they used to put a tripod over a rift in the rock and a veiled priestess sat down and waited for Apollo's message to come to her? We had that up at school when we took up Greece."
"I shall take a milking stool out with me," said Kit, promptly, "and if the situation is not already filled, I shall be the veiled priestess of Delphi."
There was a footstep in the long hallway, and the mother bird came in from the kitchen. The kitchen at Maple Lawn still bore the stamp of Cousin Roxy's taste. It was more a living-room than a "cookery." There was no library proper here, only the parlor, a large corner bedroom, and a dining-room which took up the width of the house except for the hall. This latter was the favorite consulting room of the girls, and to-day they were all busily paring early apples and quinces to put down in stone crocks, against the coming of winter days.
"Mother," called Helen, "were you ever in Delphi, where Uncle Cassius lives?"
Mrs. Robbins sat down on the arm of Jean's chair and smiled at the eager faces upturned to hers.
"Just once, long ago when I was about eight years old. We were passing through on our way east from California, and mother stayed for about a week at Delphi. It's a little college town on Lake Nadonis, about twelve miles inland from Lake Michigan, and perhaps sixty miles north of Chicago on the big bluffs that line the shore nearly all the way to Milwaukee. Uncle Cassius was a first settler there, I believe. You don't have to be very old to have been a first settler in Wisconsin. I think about the first thing he helped establish there was Hope College. I don't remember so very much about it, girls, it was so long ago. I know I loved the bluffs and the little winding paths that led up from the shore below, but it seems to me Uncle Cassius' house was rather cheerless and formal. He was a good deal of a scholar and antiquarian. Aunt Daphne seemed to me just a deprecating little shadow that trotted after him, and made life smooth."
Kit listened with the attentive curiosity of a squirrel, and Jean, who knew every changing expression on her face, was sure she was having a little private debate with herself.
"I don't think," continued Mrs. Robbins, easily, "that it is such a misfortune after all our not having a boy to fill his order. It wouldn't be a very cheerful or sympathetic home for any young person."
"Oh, but mother, dear," Kit burst forth, eagerly. "Think what glorious fun it would be to train them, and make them understand how much more interesting you can make life if you only take the right point of view."
"Yes, but supposing what seemed to be the right point of view to you, Kit, was not the right point of view to them at all. Every one looks at life from his own angle."
"Carlota always said that, too," Jean put in. "I remember at our art class each student would see the subject from a different angle and sketch accordingly. Carlota said it was exactly like life, where each one gets his own perspective."
"But you can't get any perspective at all if you shut yourself up in the dark," Kit argued. She leaned her chin on both palms, elbows planted firmly on the table, as she prepared to influence the opinion of the family. "Now just listen to this, and don't all speak at once until I get through. You went away, Jean, down to New York, and then up to Boston, and though I say it as shouldn't, right to your face, you came back to the bosom of your family, very much better satisfied and pleasanter to live with. I think after you've stayed in one place too long you get, well--as Billie says, 'fed up' and wish to goodness you could get away somewhere. I haven't any art at all, or anything special that I could wave at you and demand 'expression' as Bab Crane calls it. What I need is something new to develop my special gifts and talents, and mother darling, if you would only consent to let me