This was such a new view of his home life to Philip that he could neither combat it nor assent to it, further than to say, that his aunt was just like everybody else, though she did have some peculiar ways.

“Well, she acts,” Celia insisted, “and most people act.  Our minister acts all the time, mamma says.”  Celia had plenty of opinions of her own, but when she ventured a startling statement she had the habit of going under the shelter of “little mother,” whose casual and unconsidered remarks the girl turned to her own uses.  Perhaps she would not have understood that her mother merely meant that the minister’s sacerdotal character was not exactly his own character.  Just as Philip noticed without being able to explain it that his uncle was one sort of a man in his religious exercises and observances and another sort of man in his dealings with him.  Children often have recondite thoughts that do not get expression until their minds are more mature; they even accept contradictory facts in their experience.  There was one of the deacons who was as kind as possible, and Philip believed was a good and pious man, who had the reputation of being sharp and even tricky in a horse-trade.  And Philip used to think how lucky it was for him that he had been converted and was saved!

“Are you going to stay here always?” asked Philip, pursuing his own train of thought about the city.

“Here?  I should think not.  If I were a boy I wouldn’t stay here, I can tell you.  What are you going to do, Phil, what are you going to be?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Philip, turning over on his back and looking up into the blue world through the leaves; “go to college, I suppose.”  Children are even more reticent than adults about revealing their inner lives, and Philip would not, even to Celia, have confessed the splendid dreams about his career that came to him that day in the hickory-tree, and that occupied him a great deal.

“Of course,” said this wise child, “but that’s nothing.  I mean, what are you going to do?  My cousin Jim has been all through college, and he doesn’t do a thing except wear nice clothes and hang around and talk.  He says I’m a little chatter-box.  I hate the sight of him.”

“If he doesn’t like you, then I don’t like him,” said Philip, as if he were making a general and not a personal assertion.  “Oh, I should like to travel.”

“So should I, and see things and find things.  Jim says he’s going to be an explorer.  He never will.  He wouldn’t find anything.  He twits me, and wants to know what is the good of my reading about Africa and such things.  Phil, don’t you love to read about Africa, and the desert, and the lions and the snakes, and bananas growing, and palm-trees, and the queerest black men and women, real dwarfs some of them?  I just love it.”

“So do I,” said Philip, “as far as I have read.  Alice says it’s awful dangerous—­fevers and wild beasts and savages and all that.  But I shouldn’t mind.”