They followed her to the door, chatting, and Sewell
looked quickly out when he opened it for her.
As she shook his hand she broke into another laugh.
“Really, you looked as if you were afraid of
finding him on the steps!”
“If I could only have got near the poor boy,”
said Sewell to his wife, as they returned withindoors.
“If I could only have reached him where he lives,
as our slang says! But do what I would, I couldn’t
find any common ground where we could stand together.
We were as unlike as if we were of two different species.
I saw that everything I said bewildered him more and
more; he couldn’t understand me! Our education
is unchristian, our civilisation is pagan. They
both ought to bring us in closer relations with our
fellow-creatures, and they both only put us more widely
apart! Every one of us dwells in an impenetrable
solitude! We understand each other a little if
our circumstances are similar, but if they are different
all our words leave us dumb and unintelligible.”
Barker walked away from the minister’s door
without knowing where he was going, and with a heart
full of hot pain. He burned with a confused sense
of shame and disappointment and anger. It had
turned out just as his mother had said: Mr. Sewell
would be mighty different in Boston from what he was
that day at Willoughby Pastures. There he made
Barker think everything of his poetry, and now he
pretended to tell him that it was not worth anything;
and he kept hinting round that Barker had better go
back home and stay there. Did he think he would
have left home if there had been anything for him
to do there? Had not he as much as told him that
he was obliged to find something to make a living
by, and help the rest? What was he afraid of?
Was he afraid that Barker wanted to come and live
off him? He could show him that there was
no great danger. If he had known how, he would
have refused even to stay to dinner.
What made him keep the pictures of these people who
had got along, if he thought no one else ought to
try? Barker guessed to himself that if that Mr.
Agassiz had had to get a living off the farm at Willoughby
Pastures, he would have found time to make money.
What did Mr. Sewell mean by speaking of that Nilsson
lady by her surname, without any Miss or Mrs.?
Was that the way people talked in Boston?
Mr. Sewell had talked to him as if he were a baby,
and did not know anything; and Barker was mad at himself
for having stayed half a minute after the minister
had owned up that he had got the letter he wrote him.
He wished he had said, “Well, that’s all
I want of you, sir,” and walked right
out; but he had not known how to do it. Did they
think it was very polite to go on talking with that
woman who laughed so much, and forget all about him?
Pretty poor sort of manners to eat with her bonnet
on, and tell them she hated their victuals.
