“Now we come to the superlative sort of people,—­the extra good ones, who let everything go that isn’t solid duty; all the ornament of life,—­good looks,—­tidiness even,—­and everything that’s the least bit jolly, and that don’t keep your high-mindedness on the strain.  I want to be low-minded—­weak-minded at least—­now and then.  I can’t bear ferociously elevated people, who won’t say a word that don’t count; people that talk about their time being interrupted (as if their time wasn’t everybody else’s time, too), because somebody comes in once in a while for a friendly call; and who go about the streets as if they were so intent upon some tremendous good work, or big thinking, that it would be dangerous even to bow to a common sinner, for fear of being waylaid and hindered.  I know people like that; and all I’ve to say is that, if they’re to make up the heavenly circles, I’d full as lief go down lower, where they’re kind of social!”

There can scarcely be a subject touched, in ever so light a way,—­especially a moral or a spiritual subject,—­in however small a company of persons, that shall not set in motion varied and intense currents of thought; bear diverse and searching application to consciousness and experience.  The Josselyns sat silent with the long breadths of green cambric over their laps, listening with an amusement that freshened into their habitual work-day mood like a willful little summer breeze born out of blue morning skies, unconscious of clouds, to the oddities of Sin Saxon; but the drift of her sayings, the meaning she actually had under them, bore down upon their different knowledge with a significance whose sharpness she had no dream of.  “Plain over-and-over,”—­how well it illustrated what their young days and the disposal of them had been.  Miss Craydocke thought of the darns; her story cannot be told here; but she knew what it meant to have the darns of life fall to one’s share,—­to have the filling up to do, with dexterousness and pains and sacrifice, of holes that other people make!

For Leslie Goldthwaite, she got the next word of the lesson she was learning,—­“It depends on what one is willing to let get crowded out.”

Sin Saxon went on again.

“I’ve had a special disgust given me to superiority.  I wouldn’t be superior for all the world.  We had a superior specimen come among us at Highslope last year.  She’s there yet, it’s commonly believed; but nobody takes the trouble to be positive of it.  Reason why, she took up immediately such a position of mental and moral altitude above our heads, and became so sublimely unconscious of all beneath, that all beneath wasn’t going to strain its neck to look after her, much less provide itself with telescopes.  We’re pretty nice people, we think, but we’re not particularly curious in astronomy.  We heard great things of her, beforehand; and we were all ready to make much of her.  We asked her to our parties.