Part 5 (2/2)
”What is the matter with it?”
”Nothing--a nail--Miss Lothrop, you have no wine.”
”Nothing! and a nail!” cried Miss Julia as Lois covered her gla.s.s with her hand and forbade the wine. ”As if a nail were not enough to ruin a horse! O you careless boy! Miss Lothrop is more of a philosopher than you are. She drinks no wine.”
Tom pa.s.sed on, speaking to other ladies. Lois had scarcely spoken at all; but Miss Caruthers thought she could discern a little stir in the soft colour of the cheeks and a little additional life in the grave soft eyes; and she wished Tom heartily at a distance.
At a distance, however, he was no more that day. He made himself gracefully busy indeed with the rest of his mother's guests; but after they quitted the table, he contrived to be at Lois's side, and asked if she would not like to see the greenhouse? It was a welcome proposition, and while n.o.body at the moment paid any attention to the two young people, they pa.s.sed out by a gla.s.s door at the other end of the dining-room into the conservatory, while the stream of guests went the other way. Then Lois was plunged in a wilderness of green leaf.a.ge and brilliant bloom, warm atmosphere and mixed perfume; her first breath was an involuntary exclamation of delight and relief.
”Ah! you like this better than the other room, don't you?” said Tom.
Lois did not answer; however, she went with such an absorbed expression from one plant to another, that Tom must needs conclude she liked this better than the other company too.
”I never saw such a beautiful greenhouse,” she said at last, ”nor so large a one.”
”_This_ is not much,” replied Tom. ”Most of our plants are in the country--where I have come from to-day; this is just a city affair.
Shampuashuh don't cultivate exotics, then?”
”O no! Nor anything much, except the needful.”
”That sounds rather--tiresome,” said Tom.
”O, it is not tiresome. One does not get tired of the needful, you know.”
”Don't you! _I_ do,” said Tom. ”Awfully. But what do you do for pleasure then, up there in Shampuashuh?”
”Pleasure? O, we have it--I have it-- But we do not spend much time in the search of it. O how beautiful! what is that?”
”It's got some long name--Metrosideros, I believe. What _do_ you do for pleasure up there then, Miss Lothrop?”
”Dig clams.”
”Clams!” cried Tom.
”Yes. Long clams. It's great fun. But I find pleasure all over.”
”How come you to be such a philosopher?”
”That is not philosophy.”
”What is it? I can tell you, there isn't a girl in New York that would say what you have just said.”
Lois thought the faces around the lunch table had quite harmonized with this statement. She forgot them again in a most luxuriant trailing Pelargonium covered with large white blossoms of great elegance.
”But it is philosophy that makes you not drink wine? Or don't you like it?”
”O no,” said Lois, ”it is not philosophy; it is humanity.”
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