York had risen and was standing in the doorway, where the growing moon
revealed him clearly. Mrs. Bahrr, coming up the walk toward the
Macpherson drive, suddenly turned about and hurried away, her tall,
angular form in relief against the sky-line in the open space that lay
between the Macpherson home and the nearest buildings down the slope
toward the heart of the town.
"Coming back to common things," York continued, dropping into his
favorite chair. "My sister scandalizes me on every occasion. Whether or
not you hitch your wagon to a star, Jerry, is not so important, after
all. The real test is in just what kind of a star you hitch to. That
will tell whether you are going to ride to glory or cut such a figure as
the cow did that jumped over the moon."
"It is not always that lawyers give counsel for nothing, Jerry," Laura
began, but the line of talk was again interrupted.
The coming of callers led to many lines of discussion during the long
summer evening, in which Jerry took little part. In this new hemisphere
in which she was trying to find herself, where east seemed south and her
right hand her left, there was so much of the old hemisphere against
which she had partly burnt her bridges. The friendly familiarity of New
Eden neighbors was very different from the caste exclusiveness of the
Darby-Swaim set in Philadelphia. With the Winnowoc Valley people the
rich landholders had no social traffic. But the broad range of
conversation to-night, token of general information, called up home
memories in Jerry's mind and the long evenings when Jim Swaim's friends
gathered there to discuss world topics with her father, while she
listened with delight to all that was said. Her mother didn't care for
these things and wondered why her artistic daughter could be so
interested in them. But when the Macphersons and their guests spoke of
the latest magazines and the popular fiction and the recent drama it
brought up Lesa Swaim in her element to the listening young stranger. It
seemed so easy for the Macphersons to entertain gracefully, to make
everybody at home in the shadowy comfort of that big porch, to bring in
limeade and nut-cakes in cut-glass and fine china service, to forget
none of the things due to real courtesy, and yet to envelop all in the
genuine, open-hearted informality of the genial, open-hearted West.
Long after the remainder of the Macpherson household was asleep Jerry
Swaim lay wide awake, her mind threshed upon with the situation in which
she had suddenly found herself. And over and over in the aisles of her
thoughts what York Macpherson had said about unhitching from a star ran
side by side with Uncle Cornie's words, "If a man went right with
himself."
VIII
IF A MAN WENT RIGHT WITH HIMSELF
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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