Page:Burnett - Two Little Pilgrims' Progress A Story of the City Beautiful.djvu/81

Rh their own. It was Meg whose imagination was the stronger, and it is true that it was always she who made pictures in words and told stories. But Robin was always as ready to enter into the spirit of her imaginings as she was to talk about them. There was a word he had once heard his father use which had caught his fancy—in fact, it had attracted them both, and they applied it to this favourite pleasure of theirs of romancing with everyday things. The word was "philander."

"Now we have finished adding up and making plans," he would say, putting his ten cent account-book into his pocket, "let us philander about it."

And then Meg would begin to talk about the City Beautiful—a City Beautiful which was a wonderful and curious mixture of the enchanted one the whole world was pouring its treasures into two hundred miles away, and that City Beautiful of her own, which she had founded upon the one towards which Christian had toiled through the Slough of Despond and up the Hill of Difficulty and past Doubting Castle. Somehow one could scarcely tell where one ended and the others began, they were so much alike, these three cities—Christian's, Meg's, and the fair ephemeral one the ending of the nineteenth century had built upon the blue lake's side.