When Burlingham lapsed into
silence, laughing at himself for having talked so far over the
"kiddie's" head, she sat puzzling out what he had said. The
world seemed horribly vast and forbidding, and the sky, so blue
and bright, seemed far, far away. She sighed profoundly. "I am
so weak," she murmured. "I am so ignorant."
Burlingham nodded and winked. "Yes, but you'll grow," said be.
"I back you to win."
The color poured into her cheeks, and she burst into tears.
Burlingham thought he understood; for once his shrewdness went
far astray. Excusably, since he could not know that he had used
the same phrase that had closed Spenser's letter to her.
Late in the afternoon, when the heat had abated somewhat and
they were floating pleasantly along with the washing gently
a-flutter from lines on the roof of the auditorium, Burlingham
put Eshwell at the rudder and with Pat and the violin rehearsed
her. "The main thing, the only thing to worry about," explained
he, "is beginning right." She was standing in the center of the
stage, he on the floor of the auditorium beside the seated
orchestra. "That means," he went on, "you've simply got to learn
to come in right. We'll practice that for a while."
She went to the wings--where there was barely space for her to
conceal herself by squeezing tightly against the wall. At the
signal from him she walked out. As she had the utmost confidence
in his kindness, and as she was always too deeply interested in
what she and others were doing to be uncomfortably
self-conscious, she was not embarrassed, and thought she made
the crossing and took her stand very well.
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