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"Well," he continued, sympathetically, "that is too bad! I have some washing here—not very much—but you are welcome to it. Next week there may be more."
He went about now, stuffing articles of apparel into a blue cotton bag with a pretty design on the side.
"Do you want these any certain day?" questioned Mrs. Gerhardt.
"No," he said, reflectively, "any day next week will do."
She thanked him with a simple phrase, and started to go.
"Let me see," he said, stepping ahead of them and opening the door, "you may bring them back Monday!"
"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Gerhardt. "Thank you."
They went out and the Senator returned to his reading, but it was with a peculiarly disturbed mind.
"Too bad," he said, closing his volume. "There's something very pathetic about those people." Je
Mrs. Gerhardt and Je
"Didn't he have a fine room?" whispered Je
"Yes," answered the mother; "he's a great man."
"He's a senator, isn't he?" continued the daughter.
"Yes."
"It must be nice to be famous," said the girl, softly.
CHAPTER II
The spirit of Je
Caged in the world of the material, however, such a nature is almost invariably an anomaly. That other world of flesh into which has been woven pride and greed looks askance at the idealist, the dreamer. If one says it is sweet to look at the clouds, the answer is a warning against idleness. If one seeks to give ear to the winds, it shall be well with his soul, but they will seize upon his possessions. If all the world of the so-called inanimate delay one, calling with tenderness in sounds that seem to be too perfect to be less than understanding, it shall be ill with the body. The hands of the actual are forever reaching toward such as these— forever seizing greedily upon them. It is of such that the bond servants are made.
In the world of the actual, Je
When the soft, low call of the wood-doves, those spirits of the summer, came out of the distance, she would incline her head and listen, the whole spiritual quality of it dropping like silver bubbles into her own great heart.
Where the sunlight was warm and the shadows flecked with its splendid radiance she delighted to wonder at the pattern of it, to walk where it was most golden, and follow with instinctive appreciation the holy corridors of the trees.
Colour was not lost upon her. That wonderful radiance which fills the western sky at evening touched and unburdened her heart.
"I wonder," she said once with girlish simplicity, "how it would feel to float away off there among those clouds."
She had discovered a natural swing of a wild grape-vine, and was sitting in it with Martha and George.
"Oh, wouldn't it be nice if you had a boat up there," said George.
She was looking with uplifted face at a far-off cloud, a red island in a sea of silver.
"Just supposing," she said, "people could live on an island like that."
Her soul was already up there, and its elysian paths knew the lightness of her feet.
"There goes a bee," said George, noting a bumbler winging by.
"Yes," she said, dreamily, "it's going home."
"Does everything have a home?" asked Martha.
"Nearly everything," she answered.
"Do the birds go home?" questioned George.
"Yes," she said, deeply feeling the poetry of it herself, "the birds go home."
"Do the bees go home?" urged Martha.
"Yes, the bees go home."
"Do the dogs go home?" said George, who saw one travelling lonesomely along the nearby road.
"Why, of course," she said, "you know that dogs go home."
"Do the gnats?" he persisted, seeing one of those curious spirals of minute insects turning energetically in the waning light.
"Yes," she said, half believing her remark. "Listen!"
"Oho," exclaimed George, incredulously, "I wonder what kind of houses they live in."
"Listen!" she persisted, putting out her hand to still him.
It was that halcyon hour when the Angelus falls like a benediction upon the waning day. Far off the notes were sounding gently, and nature, now that she listened, seemed to have paused also. A scarlet-breasted robin was hopping in short spaces upon the grass before her. A humming bee hummed, a cow-bell tinkled, while some suspicious cracklings told of a secretly reco
"Oh," she said, clenching her fingers in an agony of poetic feeling. There were crystal tears overflowing in her eyes. The wondrous sea of feeling in her had stormed its banks. Of such was the spirit of Je
CHAPTER III
The junior Senator, George Sylvester Brander, was a man of peculiar
mould. In him there were joined, to a remarkable degree, the wisdom of
the opportunist and the sympathetic nature of the true representative of