第15章 CHAPTER VII--THE COMET AND THE FIXED STAR(1)

'I don't feel that I can part with Lisa now, just as she's beginning to be a help to me,' argued Mrs. Grubb, shortly after she had been welcomed and ensconced in a rocking-chair. 'As Madame Goldmarker says, nobody else in the world would have given her a home these four years, and a good many wouldn't have had her round the house.'

'That is true,' replied Mary, 'and your husband must have been a very good man from all you tell me, Mrs. Grubb.'

'Good enough, but totally uninteresting,' said that lady laconically.

'Well, putting aside the question as to whether goodness ought to be totally uninteresting, you say that Lisa's mother left Mr. Grubb three hundred dollars for her food and clothing, and that she has been ever since a willing servant, absolutely devoted to your interests.'

'We never put a cent of the three hundred dollars into our own pockets,' explained Mrs. Grubb. 'Mr. Grubb was dreadfully opposed to my doing it, but every penny of it went to freeing our religious society from debt. It was a case of the greatest good of the greatest number, and I didn't flinch. I thought it was a good deal more important that the Army of Present Perfection should have a roof over its head than that Lisa Bennett should be fed and clothed; that is, if both could not be done.'

'I don't know the creed of the Army, but it seems to me your Presently Perfect soldiers would have been rather uncomfortable under their roof if Lisa Bennett had been naked and starving outside.'

'Oh, it would never have come to that,' responded Mrs. Grubb easily.

'There is plenty of money in the world, and it belongs equally to the whole human race. I don't recognise anybody's right to have a dollar more than I have; but Mr. Grubb could never accept any belief that had been held less than a thousand years, and before he died he gave some money to a friend of his, and told him to pay me ten dollars every month towards Lisa's board. Untold gold could never pay for what my pride has suffered in having her, and if she hadn't been so useful I couldn't have done it,--I don't pretend that I could. She's an offence to the eye.'

'Not any longer,' said Mary proudly.

'Well, she was up to a few months ago; but she would always do anything for the twins, and though they are continually getting into mischief she never lets any harm come to them, not so much as a scratch. If I had taken a brighter child, she would have been for ever playing on her own account and thinking of her own pleasure; but if you once get an idea into Lisa's head of what you expect her to do, she will go on doing it to the end of the world, and wild horses couldn't keep her from it.'

'It's a pity more of us hadn't that virtue of obedience to a higher law.'

'Well, perhaps it is, and perhaps it isn't; it's a sign of a very weak mind.'

'Or a very strong one,' retorted Mary.

'There are natural leaders and natural followers,' remarked Mrs.

Grubb smilingly, as she swayed to and fro in Mary's rocking-chair.

Her smile, like a ballet-dancer's, had no connection with, nor relation to, the matter of her speech or her state of feeling; it was what a watchmaker would call a detached movement. 'I can't see,' said she, 'that it is my duty to send Lisa away to be taught, just when I need her most. My development is a good deal more important than hers.'

'Why?'

'Why? Because I have a vocation and a mission; because, if I should falter or faint by the wayside, hundreds of women who depend on me for inspiration would fall back into error and suffer permanent loss and injury.'

'Do you suppose they really would?' asked Mary rather maliciously, anxious if possible to ruffle the surface of Mrs. Grubb's exasperating placidity. 'Or would they, of course after a long period of grief-stricken apathy, attach themselves to somebody else's classes?'

'They might,' allowed Mrs. Grubb, in a tone of hurt self-respect;

'though you must know, little as you've seen of the world, that no woman has just the same revelation as any other, and that there are some who are born to interpret truth to the multitude. I can say in all humility that it has been so with me from a child. I've always had a burning desire to explore the secret chambers of Thought, always yearned to understand and explain the universe.'

'I have never tried to explain it,' sighed Mary a little wearily;

'one is so busy trying to keep one's little corner clean and sweet and pleasant, a helpful place where sad and tired souls can sit down and rest.'

'Who wants to sit down and rest? Not I!' exclaimed Mrs. Grubb. 'But then, I'm no criterion, I have such an active mind.'

'There are just a few passive virtues,' said Mary teasingly. 'We must remember that activity doesn't always make for good; sometimes it is unrest, disintegration; not growth, Mrs. Grubb, but fermentation.'

Mrs. Grubb took out a small blank-book and made a note, for she had an ear for any sentence that might be used in a speech.

'That is true. "DISTRUST THE ACTIVITY WHICH IS NOT GROWTH, BUT FERMENTATION" that will just hit some ladies in my classes, and it comes right in with something I am going to say this evening. We have a Diet Congress here this week, and there's a good deal of feeling and dispute between the various branches. I have two delegates stopping with me, and they haven't spoken to each other since yesterday morning, nor sat down to eat at the same table. I shall do all I can, as the presiding officer, to keep things pleasant at the meetings, but it will be difficult. You've never been in public life and can't understand it, but you see there are women among the delegates who've suffered the tyranny of man so long that they will cook anything their husbands demand; women who believe in eating any kind of food, and hold that the principal trouble lies in bad cooking; women who will give up meat, but still indulge in all sorts of cakes, pastries, and kickshaws; and women who are strong on temperance in drink, but who see no need of temperance in food. The whole question of diet reform is in an awful state, and a Congress is the only way to settle it.'