At this amiable speech even Christine could not help thanking her.  “Of course,” she said, “I expect to get another, right off.  Mr. Beaton is going to choose it for me.”

“You are very fortunate.  If you haven’t a teacher yet I should so like to recommend mine.”

Mela broke out in her laugh again.  “Oh, I guess Christine’s pretty well suited with the one she’s got,” she said, with insinuation.  Her sister gave her a frowning glance, and Margaret did not tempt her to explain.

“Then that’s much better,” she said.  “I have a kind of superstition in such matters; I don’t like to make a second choice.  In a shop I like to take the first thing of the kind I’m looking for, and even if I choose further I come back to the original.”

“How funny!” said Mela.  “Well, now, I’m just the other way.  I always take the last thing, after I’ve picked over all the rest.  My luck always seems to be at the bottom of the heap.  Now, Christine, she’s more like you.  I believe she could walk right up blindfolded and put her hand on the thing she wants every time.”

“I’m like father,” said Christine, softened a little by the celebration of her peculiarity.  “He says the reason so many people don’t get what they want is that they don’t want it bad enough.  Now, when I want a thing, it seems to me that I want it all through.”

“Well, that’s just like father, too,” said Mela.  “That’s the way he done when he got that eighty-acre piece next to Moffitt that he kept when he sold the farm, and that’s got some of the best gas-wells on it now that there is anywhere.”  She addressed the explanation to her sister, to the exclusion of Margaret, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the conversation.  Mela rewarded her amiability by saying to her, finally, “You’ve never been in the natural-gas country, have you?”

“Oh no!  And I should so much like to see it!” said Margaret, with a fervor that was partly, voluntary.

“Would you?  Well, we’re kind of sick of it, but I suppose it would strike a stranger.”

“I never got tired of looking at the big wells when they lit them up,” said Christine.  “It seems as if the world was on fire.”

“Yes, and when you see the surface-gas burnun’ down in the woods, like it used to by our spring-house-so still, and never spreadun’ any, just like a bed of some kind of wild flowers when you ketch sight of it a piece off.”

They began to tell of the wonders of their strange land in an antiphony of reminiscences and descriptions; they unconsciously imputed a merit to themselves from the number and violence of the wells on their father’s property; they bragged of the high civilization of Moffitt, which they compared to its advantage with that of New York.  They became excited by Margaret’s interest in natural gas, and forgot to be suspicious and envious.

She said, as she rose, “Oh, how much I should like to see it all!” Then she made a little pause, and added: