“But perhaps, after all, I may have been unfair to her!” said Molly. “People are so queer! They seem sometimes to be altogether made up of odd bits of different people. There’s Aunt Ann now! she would not do a tradesman out of a ha’penny, but she will cheat at backgammon!” “I know she will, and that is why I never play with her. It is so seldom she will give herself any recreation, that it makes me sorry to refuse her.” “There is one thing that troubles me,” said Molly, after a little pause. “What is it, my child? I always like to hear something troubles you, for then I know you are going to have something. To miss is the preparation for receiving.” “I can’t care--much--about poetry--and Walter says such fine things about it! Walter is no fool!” “Far from one, I am glad to think!” said Richard, laughing. Molly’s straightforward, humble confidence, he found as delightful as amusing. “It seems to me so silly to scoff at things because you can’t go in for them! I sometimes hear people make insulting remarks about music, and music I _know_ to be a good and precious and lovely thing. Then I think with myself, they must be in the same condition with regard to music, that I am in with regard to poetry. So I take care not to be a fool in talking about what I don’t know. That I am stupid is no reason for being a fool. Any one whom God has made stupid, has a right to be stupid, but no right to call others fool because they are not stupid.” “I thought you liked poetry, Molly!” “So I do when you read it, or talk about it. It seems as if you made your way of it grow my way of it. I hear the poetry and feel your feeling of it. But when I try to read it myself, then I don’t care for it. Sometimes I turn it into prose, and then I get a hold of it.” “That is about the best and hardest test you could put it to, Molly! But perhaps you have been trying to like what ought not, because it does not deserve to be liked. There is much in the shape of poetry that set in gold and diamonds would be worth nothing.” “I think the difficulty is in myself. Sometimes I am in the fit mood, and other times not. A single line will now and then set something churning, churning in me, so that I can not understand myself. It will make me think of music, and sunrise, and the wind, and the song of the lark, and all lovely things. But sometimes prose will serve me the same. And the next minute, perhaps, either of them will be boring me more than I can bear! I know it is my own fault, but--” “Stop there, Molly! It may sometimes be your own fault, but certainly not always! You are fastidious, little one; and in exquisite things how can one be too fastidious! When Walter is gone, suppose we read a little more poetry together?” Richard Colman had made some money in one of the good farming times, but of late had not been increasing his store. But he was a man too genuinely practical to set his mind upon making money.