The End of a Coil

"What, Dolly?"

"How to do, Aunt Harry."

"How to do what?"

"Everything. I was thinking particularly just then" – Dolly hesitated.

"Yes, of what?"

"Of dressing myself."

"Dressing yourself, you chicken?"

"Yes, Aunt Harry. I see it. If I do not dress for Christ, I do it for the world."

"Don't go into another extreme now, Dolly."

"No, Aunt Harry. I cannot be wrong, can I, if I do it for Christ?"

"I wonder how many girls of sixteen in the country have such a thought? And I wonder, how long will you be able to keep it, Dolly?"

"Why not, Aunt Harry?"

"O child! because you have got to meet the world."

"What will the world do to me?" Dolly asked, half laughing in her simple ignorance.

"When I think what it will do to you, Dolly, I am ready to break my heart. It will tempt you, child. It will tempt you with beauty, and with pleasant things; pleasant things that look so harmless! and it will seek to persuade you with sweet voices and with voices of authority; and it will show you everybody going one way, and that not your way."

"But I will follow Christ, Aunt Hal."

"Then you will have to bear reproach."

"I would rather bear the world's reproach, than His."

"If you don't get over-persuaded, child, or deafened with the voices!"

"She will have to do like the little girl in the fairy tale," said Mr. Eberstein; "stuff cotton in her ears. The little girl in the fairy tale was going up a hill to get something at the top – what was she going for, that was at the top of the hill?"

"I know!" cried Dolly. "I remember. She was going for three things. The Singing bird and the Golden water, and – I forget what the third thing was."

"Well, you see what that means," Mr. Eberstein went on. "She was going up the hill for the Golden water at the top; and there were ten thousand voices in her ears tempting her to look round; and if she looked, she would be turned to stone. The road was lined with stones, which had once been pilgrims. You see, Dolly? Her only way was to stop her ears."

"I see, Uncle Ned."

"What shall Dolly stop her ears with?" asked Mrs. Eberstein.

"These words will do. 'Whether ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.'"

There was little more talking, for as the evening drew on, the heaviness of the parting weighed too hard upon all hearts. The next day Dolly made the journey to Boston, and from there to her parents' house; and her childhood's days were over.

CHAPTER VII

PLAYTHINGS

Dolly did not know that her childhood was over. Every pulse of her happy little heart said the contrary, when she found herself again among her old haunts and was going the rounds of them, the morning after her return home. She came in at last to her mother, flushed and warm.

"Mother, what are we going away for?" she began.

"Your father knows. I don't. Men never know when they are well off."

"Do women?"

"I used to think so."

"Is it as pleasant in England as it is here?"

"Depends on where you are placed, I suppose, and how you are placed. How can I tell? I have never been in England."

"Mother, we have got the prettiest little calf in the barn that you ever saw."

"In the barn! A queer place for a calf to be, it seems to me."

"Yes, because they want to keep it from the cow. Johnson is going to rear it, he says. I am so glad it is not to be killed! It is spotted, mother; all red and white; and so prettily spotted!"

An inarticulate sound from Mrs. Copley, which might mean anything.

"And, mother, I have been getting the eggs. And Johnson has a hen setting. We shall have chickens pretty soon."

"Dolly Copley, how old are you?"

"Sixteen last Christmas, mother."

"And seventeen next Christmas."

"Yes, ma'am, but next Christmas is not come yet."

"Seems to me, it is near enough for you to be something besides a child."

"What's the harm, mother?"

"Harm?" said Mrs. Copley with a sharp accent; "why, when one has a woman's work to do, one had better be a woman to do it. How is a child to fill a woman's place?"

"I have only a child's place to fill, just now," said Dolly merrily. "I have no woman's work to do, mother."

"Yes, you have. You have got to go into society, and play your part in society, and be married by and by; and then you'll know that a woman's part isn't so easy to play."

Dolly looked grave.