Seating herself again on the yellow floor of the porch, within range of Miss Prudence’s vision, but not near enough to disturb her, Marjorie bit the unsharpened end of her pencil and looked long at the puzzling sentences on the foolscap.  With the attitude of attentiveness she was not always attentive; Mr. Holmes told her that she lacked concentration and that she could not succeed without it.  Marjorie was very anxious to “succeed.”  She scribbled awhile, making a comma and a dash, a parenthesis, an interrogation point, an asterisk and a line of asterisks!  But the sense was not changed; there was nobody new in the stage-coach and nobody did anything new.  Then she rewrote it again, giving the little child to the foreigner and lady; she wanted the child to have a father and mother, even if the father were a foreigner and did not speak English; she called the foreigner Mr. Angelo, and imagined him to be a brother of the celebrated Michael Angelo; making a dive into the shallow depths of her knowledge of Italian nomenclature she selected a name for the child, a little girl, of course—­Corrinne would do, or it might be a boy and named for his uncle Michael.  In what age of the world had Michael Angelo lived?  At the same time with Petrarch and Galileo, and Tasso and—­did she know about any other Italians?  Oh, yes.  Silvio Pellico,—­wasn’t he in prison and didn’t he write about it?  And was not the leaning tower of Pisa in Italy?  Was that one of the Seven Wonders of the World?  And weren’t there Seven Wise Men of Greece?  And wasn’t there a story about the Seven Sleepers?  But weren’t they in Asia?  And weren’t the churches in Revelation in Asia?  And wasn’t the one at Laodicea lukewarm?  And did people mix bread with lukewarm water in summer as well as winter?  And wasn’t it queer—­why how had she got there?  But it was queer for the oriental king to refuse to believe and say it wasn’t so—­that water couldn’t become hard enough for people to walk on it!  And it was funny for the East Indian servant to be alarmed because the butter was “spoiled,” just because when they were up in the mountains it became hard and was not like oil as it was down in Calcutta!  And that was where Henry Martyn went, and he dressed all in white, and his face was so lovely and pure, like an angel’s; and angels were like young men, for at the resurrection didn’t it say they were young men!  Or was it some other time?  And how do you spell resurrection?  Was that the word that had one s and two r’s in it?  And how would you write two r’s? Would punctuation teach you that?  Was B a word and could you spell it?

“Well, Marjorie?”

“Oh, dear me!” exclaimed Marjorie.  “I’ve been away off!  I always do go away off!  I don’t remember what the last thing I thought of was.  I never shall be concentrated,” she sighed.  “I believe I could go right on and think of fifty other things.  One thing always reminds me of some thing else.”