She made the queer little gesture with her hands that he had noticed
before. And she smiled quite pleasantly at Mr. Thompson in womanly
inconsistency with the attitude she had just been explaining she held
toward ministers.
"One gets such silly notions," she remarked. "Just like your idea that
you can come here and do good. You can't, you know--not for others--not
by your method. It's absurd. One can help others most, I really believe,
by helping oneself. I've noticed in reading of the phenomena of human
relations that the most pronounced idealists are frequently a sad burden
to others."
Mr. Thompson found himself at a loss for instant reply. It was a trifle
less direct, more subtle than he liked. It opened hazily paths of
speculation he had never explored because generalizations of that sort
had never been propounded to him--certainly never by a young woman whose
very physical presence disturbed him sadly.
And while he was turning that last sentence over uncomfortably in his
mind a hail sounded across the meadow. Sophie stood up and waved the tin
bucket she had in her hand. Tommy Ashe came striding toward them. He,
too, carried a tin bucket.
"We're going to a blackberry patch down the creek," Sophie answered
Thompson's involuntary look of inquiry. "Get a pail and come along."
"I must work," Thompson shook his head.
"Berry-picking's work, if work is what you want," she retorted. "You'd
think so by the time you'd picked a hundred quarts or more and preserved
them for winter use. But then I suppose your winter supply will
emanate from some mysterious, beneficent source, without any effort on
your part. How fortunate that will be."
She tempered this sally with a laugh, and being presently joined by
Tommy Ashe, set off toward the bank of Lone Moose, leaving Mr. Thompson
sitting on his log, indulging in some very mixed reflections.
The task he was engaged upon seemed suddenly to have lost its savor.
Whether this arose from a depressing sense of inability to deny the
truth of much that Sophie Carr had just said, or from the fact that as
he sat there looking after them he found himself envying Tommy Ashe's
pleasant intimacy with the girl, he could not say. Indeed, he did not
inquire too closely of himself. Some of the conclusions he was latterly
arriving at were so radically different from what he was accustomed to
accepting that he was a little bit afraid of them.
It took him a considerable time to get back into a proper working frame
of mind. The progress of his wooden edifice suffered by that much. When
he went trudging home at last, sweaty and tired, with his axe over one
shoulder, he was wondering frankly if, after all, it was either wise or
necessary to establish a mission at Lone Moose. What good could he or
any other man possibly do there? The logical and proper answer to that
did not spring as readily to his lips as it would have done at the time
of his appointment by the Board of Home Missions.