Page:Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903).djvu/281

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rhymed Rebecca. "Oh! if I could only think and speak as you do!" she sighed. "I am so afraid I shall never get education enough to make a good writer."

"You could worry about plenty of other things to better advantage," said Miss Maxwell, a little scornfully. "Be afraid, for instance, that you won't understand human nature; that you won't realize the beauty of the outer world; that you may lack sympathy, and thus never be able to read a heart; that your faculty of expression may not keep pace with your ideas,—a thousand things, every one of them more important to the writer than the knowledge that is found in books. Æsop was a Greek slave who could not even write down his wonderful fables; yet all the world reads them."

"I did n't know that," said Rebecca, with a half sob. "I did n't know anything until I met you!"

"You will only have had a high school course, but the most famous universities do not always succeed in making men and women. When I long to go abroad and study, I always remember that there were three great schools in Athens and two in Jerusalem, but the Teacher of all teachers came out of Nazareth, a little village hidden away from the bigger, busier world."

"Mr. Ladd says that you are almost wasted on Wareham," said Rebecca thoughtfully.