They were full of Rosamond!  Desire did not speak a word.

Dorris had heard and said it over.  It seemed to please Kenneth to hear it again.  “A piece of her world!”

“How quickly a true person springs to what belongs to—­their life!” said Kenneth, using that wrong little pronoun that we shall never be able to do without.

“People don’t always get what belongs, though,” blurted Desire at last, just as they came to the long doorsteps.  “Some people’s lives are like complementary colors, I think; they see blue, and live red!”

“But the colors are only accidentally—­I mean temporarily—­divided; they are together in the sun; and they join somewhere—­beyond.”

“I hate beyond!” said Desire, recklessly.  “Good-night.  Thank you.”  And she ran up the steps.

Nobody knew what she meant.  Perhaps she hardly knew herself.

They only thought that her home life was not suited to her, and that she took it hard.

XIV.

“SESAME; AND LILIES.”

“I’ve got a discouragement at my stomach,” said Luclarion Grapp.

“What’s the matter?” asked Mrs. Ripwinkley, naturally.

“Mrs. Scarup.  I’ve been there.  There ain’t any bottom to it.”

“Well?”

Mrs. Ripwinkley knew that Luclarion had more to say, and that she waited for this monosyllable.

“She’s sick again.  And Scarup, he’s gone out West, spending a hundred dollars to see whether or no there’s a chance anywhere for a smart man,—­and that ain’t he, so it’s a double waste,—­to make fifty.  No girl; and the children all under foot, and Pinkie looking miserable over the dishes.”

“Pinkie isn’t strong.”

“No.  She’s powerful weak.  I just wish you’d seen that dirty settin’-room fire-place; looks as if it hadn’t been touched since Scarup smoked his pipe there, the night before he went off a wild-gandering.  And clo’es to be ironed, and the girl cleared out, because ‘she’d always been used to fust-class families.’  There wasn’t anything to your hand, and you couldn’t tell where to begin, unless you began with a cataplasm!”

Luclarion had heard, by chance, of a cataclysm, and that was what she meant.

“It wants—­creation, over again!  Mrs. Scarup hadn’t any fit breakfast; there was burnt toast, made out of tough bread, that she’d been trying to eat; and a cup of tea, half drunk; something the matter with that, I presume.  I’d have made her some gruel, if there’d been a fire; and if there’d been any kindlings, I’d have made her a fire; but there ’twas; there wasn’t any bottom to it!”

“You had better make the gruel here, Luclarion.”

“That’s what I come back for.  But—­Mrs. Ripwinkley!”

“Well?”

“Don’t it appear to you it’s a kind of a stump?  I don’t want to do it just for the satisfaction; though it would be a satisfaction to plough everything up thorough, and then rake it over smooth; what do you think?”