CHAPTER XXI WORK AND DREAMS
By early afternoon Jeanne's old cheerful smile was back again. And whynot? Was she not seated between two friends, Jensie and Tom, studying thedialogue of this altogether absorbing movie that hour by hour took on amore vivid picture of reality?
They were having a gay time there in Lorena LeMar's living room. Fromtime to time peals of laughter came drifting out through the open window.
Jensie was the critic. And a very expert critic she turned out to be.
"No. He would never say that, your old Jud who lives at the foot of BigBlack Mountain. He would not say, 'Those horses are fast travelers.' He'dsay, 'Them's the travelin'est hosses I ever most seed.' He wouldn't say,'It's done.' He'd say, 'I done done it.'"
"But Jensie," Jeanne protested, "if we change all this, how are thepeople going to know what it's all about? Might as well have him talkGerman."
"W-e-l-l, you asked me." Jensie puckered her fair brow. "That's the waywe talk down there. We don't say 'rifle,' but 'rifle-gun.' We say'we-uns' and 'you-all.'"
"Well," said Tom after a moment's thought, "a great deal of that is easyenough to understand. It does make the whole thing seem a lot more real.And if we find old Jud talking too much, why, we'll just shut him up andmake him talk with his hands and his feet."
"And his pistol-gun," Jensie added. "Pistol-guns talk a heap down therein the mountings."
They all had a good laugh, and once more the work moved on smoothly.
"To-morrow," Jeanne said to Jensie before bidding her good-bye,"to-morrow morning we will go out to that so beautiful college you havebeen telling me about. What do you say?"
"That," Jensie laughed joyfully, "that's a right smart clever idea."
"Then we shall go." Jeanne gave her hand a squeeze. "I am tired. Thereare trees, you say, and grass, very much grass. Good! We shall sit uponthe grass beneath those spreading elms and forget this noisy city."
They went. The electric car whirled them away to the country. It seemedthat but a moment had passed when they found themselves walking up a pathshaded by two rows of ancient elms.
"So green the grass!" Jeanne murmured. "So graceful the trees and sostrong! And that fine old building of limestone. It is like France, my sobeautiful France!
"But listen!"
She paused. From a smaller building with very high windows there floatedthe words of a song.
"Singing? It is Chapel! Come!" Jeanne seized Jensie by the hand. "Comequick! We will slip into a back seat. It has been so long, oh, so longsince I heard such singing."
As they entered the door all heads were bowed in prayer. Deeplyreligious, as all the best of her race are, Jeanne bowed her headreverently.
The prayer at an end, six hundred young voices burst into song.
"And how they sing it!" There were tears in Jeanne's eyes. "They singwhat they believe. How very, very wonderful!"
Hidden away in a high-backed seat, they listened to the simple, sinceremessage of a white-haired professor as he talked to this silent audienceof young people about God and His relation to their lives.
Jeanne was strangely silent as she left the place. Perhaps in her mindwas a picture of the little stone church in her own land where she had sooften knelt in prayer.
"It is good," she murmured at last. "Tomorrow as I try to tell to theworld in pictures the story of simple, kindly folks who live in themountains, I shall do it better because of having been here."
For a long time they sat on the grass beneath the elms. A gray squirrelcame down a tree to chatter at them. A robin, whose nest was in a nearbylilac bush, sang them a song. A cricket chirped. From far away came adog's bark. A cobweb went floating high overhead.
"Come!" Jeanne whispered reluctantly. "We must go back."
That night as she sat looking out into the half darkness of the night,Jeanne saw again in her mind's eye the girl in a nile-green dress andgolden slippers. And as before, the green changed its shade and became asloping hill where broad elms sighed in the breeze.
"There will be no nile-green dress and golden slippers," she whispered."Instead, if success is ours, Jensie shall go to that so beautifulcollege where they sing that which they believe and ask such wonderfulprayers."
And down in her heart of hearts she knew that she would strive harder forsuccess than ever before, because she was working for another's happinessand not entirely for her own.