“Children have more need of models than of critics,” said
grandmother, “therefore I will give you another model to-night. You
will think I am always choosing for you stories of girls that work;
but where can I find models of any other kind? What do girls amount
to who think only of their own pleasure, and never persevere to the
successful end? Now I will tell you about a girl who came in
womanhood to live in an observatory. This is her home. She is a dear
old lady with white hair, dressed in gray or brown, in rather
Quakerish fashion. She said to the girls she teaches: ‘All the
clothing I have on cost but seventeen dollars.’ In this unusual home
(she is not a grandmother, either), she keeps the things she loves
best,—her books, her pictures, her astronomical clock, and a bust of
Mary Somerville, of whom I will tell you some time.”
“And then we will remember that her bust is in somebody’s observatory
home,” said Bess.
“It is not a wonder that Maria Mitchell has great respect for girls
who do something, and for idle girls none at all. As Juliet was at
Nantucket last summer she will be interested to know that Maria
Mitchell was born in that quiet, delightful place. She was in a home
of ten children. Her mother was a Quaker girl, a descendant of
Benjamin Franklin. Her father was a school teacher. Little Maria went
to school to her father. At school she studied, and with ten little
people at home, what do you think she did? She herself calls her
work, ‘endless washing of dishes.’ The dishwashing never hindered. I
think it helped. I believe in dishwashing. I wonder what this little
girl would have thought of the dishwasher that some people have in
their kitchens, and is warranted to wash sixty-five dishes (in the
smaller affair) at once, in the soap-sudsy, steamy, crank-turning
space of three blessed minutes. And all dried, too. But in her
observatory she had no need to think of dishwashing. Like Rosa
Bonheur, and Harriet Hosmer, she had a good father and a wise father.
When he was eight years old his father called him to the door to look
at the planet Saturn, and from that time the boy calculated his age
from the position of the planet, year by year.”
“Then it began with her grandfather,” said Juliet, who liked to find
the beginnings of things.
“Her father had a little observatory of his own, on his own land,
that he might study the stars. So it is no marvel that his daughter
is ending her useful days in a big observatory. When Maria went to
her observatory, her father was seventy years of age; he needed her
as nurse and companion, but he said, ‘Go, and I will go with you.’”
“This is the loveliest story of all,” exclaimed Grace, who loves her
own old father dearly.
“For four years her father lived to be proud of her, and enjoyed her
work and her pupils at Vassar College. When Maria was a girl her
father could see no reason why she should not become as well educated
as his boys, so he gave her, as to them, a special drill in
navigation.”
“Grandmother,” asked Ethel, “did you know all these little girls when
they were little?”
“No, darling,” said grandmother, “I found out about them in books.
And telling you about the girls is getting you ready to read about
them all the little things the world has a right to know. For they
belong to the whole world. Maria did not learn fancy work. I can
guess what she would say of some girls who care more for fancy
stitches than for studies. She has said, ‘A woman might be learning
seven languages while she is learning fancy work.’ Still, girls,
educate your fingers, and make your homes pretty and attractive. But
don’t let stitches hinder the stars—God has his place for both.”
“Yes, the women worked pretty things for the Tabernacle,” I said.
(For I love to make pretty things.)
“But she did know how to knit, and she knit stockings a yard long for
her father as long as he lived. She studied while she knit, as I used
to do when I was a little girl. When she was a little girl how she
did read! Before she was ten years old she read through Rollin’s
_Ancient History_.
“One night in October, 1847, she was gazing through her telescope,
and what do you think she saw? An unknown comet. She was afraid it
was an old story. Frederick VI., King of Denmark, sixteen years
before, had offered a gold medal to the person who should discover a
telescopic comet. And the little Nantucket girl, who had knitted
stockings a yard long, and washed endless dishes, discovered the
telescopic comet, and to her was awarded the gold medal. And now the
scientific journals announced Miss Mitchell’s comet. In England she
was eagerly welcomed by Sir John and Lady Herschel, and Alexander Von
Humboldt took her beside him on a sofa and talked to her about
everybody he knew and everything he knew. And, oh! the other great
people who were glad to see her. She saw in Rome Frederika Bremer, of
whose comical, interesting, sad girlhood I must tell you some day.
But I musn’t forget the little house Maria bought for her father
before she went to the observatory of Vassar College. It cost sixteen
hundred and fifty dollars, and she saved the money out of her yearly
salary of one hundred dollars, and what she could earn in government
work.”
“I don’t think I mind washing dishes so much now,” declared Nan.
And we all laughed.
“Good,” exclaimed Judith’s listener. “Keep on with the dozen, and
salt them down. _When I Was a Boy_ series will be a good thing for
you. Judith, honest, now, would you rather go away to school this
winter, or read and write with Marion and me?”
“Study with you,” was the quick decision; “I can think of nothing in
the world I would like so well.”
“Then that is settled,” he replied with satisfaction; “I feared you
would be restless. You are at the frisky and restless age. Marion was
sure you would not be.”
“But—” Judith hesitated and colored painfully, “if I am to teach by
and by, would it be better for me to go to school? I can borrow the
money and then earn it by teaching and repay Aunt Affy.”
“We are not making a teacher of you; we are making an educated woman—”
“But, Roger,” she persisted, “unless I go back to Aunt Affy I must
support myself. I am not willing to be dependent upon any one except
Aunt Affy.”
“Upon whom are you dependent now? Are you not earning your board by
being co-operative housekeeper?”
“If you and Marion think so.”
“Ask Marion.”
“But I would like to ask you, too?”
“I thought my little sister had more delicacy of feeling than to ask
such a question.”
“Roger, don’t be a goose,” she said, indignantly, “that was all very
well when I was a child. You forget that I am grown up.”
“You will not let me forget it.”
“I wish you not to forget it. In the spring, on my nineteenth
birthday, I shall decide upon my future. Just think, I have a
future,” she laughed. “I am only too glad of the study and music this
winter. Then I shall go out into the world, or go back to Aunt Affy.
I do not mean to be too proud—” with a quiver of the lip.
“Only just proud enough. You are exactly that. Let us live in peace
this winter, and then your nineteenth birthday may do its worst for
us all.”
“You will not be serious,” she answered, with vexed tears; “my life
is a great deal to me.”
“It is a great deal to us all, dear. Work and be patient, and you
will have as happy an ending as any story you write.”
“My children end as children,” she said, with a quick laugh. “I
shouldn’t know what to do with them if they grew up.”
“There is One who does know what to do with his children when they
grow up,” said Roger, bending as he stood beside her and touching her
lips with his own. It was the first time he had ever kissed her. She
took the kiss as gravely and simply as it was given. Something was
sealed between them. She would never be proud with him again.
“I will not kiss you again,” said Roger to himself, “until you
promise to be my wife.”
That afternoon Roger asked Marion to drive to Meadow Centre.
“I am glad you did not ask Judith,” replied Marion, with something in
her voice.
“Why not?” he asked, indignantly, “why shouldn’t I ask Judith to
drive with me?”
“My point was not driving with you, but driving to Meadow Centre.”
“I confess I do not understand you.”
“I knew you didn’t. Men are blind creatures.”
“Then open the eyes of one blind creature.”
“Haven’t you seen that Mr. King is interested in Judith?” she asked,
somewhat impatiently.
“We are all interested in Judith.”
“Not just as _he_ is. You are not,” looking straight into his frank,
smiling eyes.
“You don’t mean—”
“Yes, I do mean—”
“What about _her_?” he asked with the color hot in his face. But
Marion was a “blind creature” then and did not see.
“I don’t know about her. She isn’t grown up enough to think. But I
know he is wonderfully attractive to her.”
“He’s a good fellow. I will not stand in his way.”
“For pity’s sake, Roger, don’t think you must do anything,” cried
Marion, dismayed; “let her alone. He will take care of himself.”
“I shall certainly let her alone. He is so artless that he will be
taken care of. It is like him to stumble into the best thing in the
universe and then wonder how he ever got it.”
“I hope you don’t call Meadow Centre one of the best things,”
retorted Marion.
“It’s a good place for a man to make something of himself; he is
writing sermons that will make a stir somewhere. Meadow Centre is to
him what Paul’s three years in Arabia were to him.”
“Then we must do our best to make Judith ready—”
“What a plotter you are,” he exclaimed, angrily; then, more quietly:
“But we will make Judith ready,” and he walked off with a laugh that
was a mixture of things.
This day, in which God’s daily bread and his daily will were given to
Judith as upon all the other days, was one of the very happiest days
of her happy life.
Roger’s kiss gave her an undefined sense of safety and protection; if
she were not wise enough to decide when the time came she would take
refuge in that safety and protection, and—another kiss.
That evening Joe came for her, saying Aunt Rody was worse. She went
home with him, and “watched” with Aunt Affy, until poor Aunt Rody
passed away from the home she had toiled so unceasingly for and taken
so little comfort in. One week she stayed with Aunt Affy: “I miss her
so,” wept Aunt Affy broken-heartedly; “I never was in the world
without her before.”
“I suppose we musn’t keep you, Judith,” Uncle Cephas remarked one
evening behind his newspaper.
“Not yet,” said Judith. “I want to be as busy as a bee this winter to
get ready for something.”
“Then we will have to adopt Joe; we must have some young thing about
the house.”
Judith’s first words to Roger and Marion as they went out to welcome
her on the piazza were in a burst: “I do think those two old people
growing old together is the loveliest thing I ever saw.”
“How young must two people begin to grow old together?” inquired
Roger, comically.
“As soon as they think about growing old,” said Marion.
“Then I will not begin to think until my birthday,” said Judith.
“Marion, I am too happy in having two homes. Some better girl than I
should have them.”
“You forget your third home in England,” remarked Roger, seriously.
“Oh, poor Don. Roger, I am afraid Don isn’t happy,” she said, with
slow emphasis.
What Roger thought he did not say.
Don’s letters were brief, constrained; Judith’s letter to her “new,
dear Cousin Florence” had met with no response—that Judith knew.