your aunt Patience in a theatre and hear what she
said about it. She's an actress if ever there was one."

Philip opened his eyes in protest.

"Mamma says it is as good as a play to hear her go on about people, and
what they are like, and what they are going to do, and then her little
rooms are just like a scene on a stage. If they were in New York
everybody would go to see them and to hear her talk."

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 c