Page:Burnett - Two Little Pilgrims' Progress A Story of the City Beautiful.djvu/48

36 almost by heart. How they studied the pictures, trying to gather the proportions and colour of every column or dome or arch! What enthusiast living in Chicago itself knew the marvel as they did, and so dwelt on and revelled in its beauties! No one knew of their pleasure—like the Straw Parlour, it was a secret. The strangeness of their lives lay in the fact that absolutely no one knew anything about them at all or asked anything, thinking it quite enough that their friendlessness was supplied with enough animal heat and nourishment to keep their bodies alive.

Of that other part of them—their restless, growing young brains, and naturally craving hearts, which in their own poor enough but still humain little home had at least been recognised and cared for—Aunt Matilda knew nothing, and indeed had never given a thought to. She had not undertaken the care of intelligences and affections; her own were not of an order to require supervision. She was too much occupied with her five-hundred-acre farm and the amazing things she was doing with it. That the children could read and write and understand some arithmetic she knew. She had learned no more herself, and had found it enough to build her fortune upon. She had never known what it was to feel lonely and neglected, because she was a person quite