Bildungsromans; City and town life -- Juvenile fiction; First loves -- Juvenile fiction; Religion -- Philosophy -- Juvenile fiction
"And then," said Mr. Beamer, "I says to her: 'Now, if you want to see
how true everything I've been saying is, we'll just put this to a
practical proof.' I'd noticed a woman with lines back there in the car
slapping two sleepy children, and I told Matilda we'd each take a child
for an hour and give her lines a chance to smooth out a little, and then
we'd come back on the platform and talk it over."
"So we did it," said Matilda, "and when I took the baby back to the
woman, she burst out crying and said she'd tried to hold in all day and
just couldn't any longer, cause her mother was sick and had been sick so
long, and she couldn't leave the children to go to her 'cause the
children was the neighbor's and left with her to board, and she'd never
liked children and only took 'em 'cause her mother needed the money."
"Showing," interrupted Mr. Beamer, "how we'd misjudged her and her hard
lines, which is another feature of my crusade, as lots don't think
enough about."
"But what come next was just like a story, too," Matilda said. "When I
got to Mrs. Camp's at last, I found Mrs. Camp so changed that if I
hadn't met Matthew on the train and got something to hold on to, I
couldn't have stayed in the house an hour."
"Why, what was the matter with Mrs. Camp?" Susan asked anxiously.
"Why, all Mrs. Camp's family is married now, and it seems she was so
lonely she's turned into a social settler or some such thing, and her
nice, quiet house where I'd looked to rest was one swarm of Italians
learning English and girls learning sewing and women asking advice and
such a chaos of Bedlam you never dreamed. If it hadn't been for my just
having got religion that way, I'd have turned around and come straight
back home. But as it was, I didn't have time to do anything but get into
my blue print and take hold right with her and get some order into
things in general."
"Oh, Aunt Matilda!" Jane's face was radiant.
"Afternoons Matthew came with an auto, and he'd take me off with the
back seat full of children, and we'd hunt hard lines anywhere they
looked likely."
"And then, of course, we soon got married," said Mr. Beamer.
"Yes, and that's all," said Matilda. "_Now did you ever?_"
There was a sudden hush, until finally Susan said, through tears: "Oh,
Matilda,--it's like something in heaven's got loose and fell right down
over us, isn't it?"
"I think it's all too wonderful," said Jane.
"Of course there really is something out of heaven spread over earth
every day," said Lorenzo, low, and very reverently; "only people don't
see it."
"But nowadays, everybody's beginning to recognize it," Jane murmured.
"It's like it says in one of my books," said Mr. Beamer. "God's a
reservoir and we're all pipes, just as soon as we're willing to be
pipes, and then He pours through us according to how willing we are,
because you're big or little just according to how willing you are."
"Let us all be very willing," said Jane.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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