see blue, and live
red!"

"But the colors are only accidentally--I mean temporarily--divided;
they are together in the sun; and they join somewhere--beyond."

"I hate beyond!" said Desire, recklessly. "Good-night. Thank you."
And she ran up the steps.

Nobody knew what she meant. Perhaps she hardly knew herself.

They only thought that her home life was not suited to her, and that
she took it hard.

XIV.

"SESAME; AND LILIES."

"I've got a discouragement at my stomach," said Luclarion Grapp.

"What's the matter?" asked Mrs. Ripwinkley, naturally.

"Mrs. Scarup. I've been there. There ain't any bottom to it."

"Well?"

Mrs. Ripwinkley knew that Luclarion had more to say, and that she
waited for this monosyllable.

"She's sick again. And Scarup, he's gone out West, spending a
hundred dollars to see whether or no there's a chance anywhere for a
_smart_ man,--and that ain't he, so it's a double waste,--to make
fifty. No girl; and the children all under foot, and Pinkie looking
miserable over the dishes."

"Pinkie isn't strong."

"No. She's powerful weak. I just wish you'd seen that dirty
settin'-room fire-place; looks as if it hadn't been touched since
Scarup smoked his pipe there, the night before he went off a
wild-gandering. And clo'es to be ironed, and the girl cleared out,
because 'she'd always been used to fust-class families.' There
wasn't anything to your hand, and you couldn't tell where to begin,
unless you began with a cataplasm!"

Luclarion had heard, by chance, of a cataclysm, and that was what
she meant.

"It wants--creation, over again! Mrs. Scarup hadn't any fit
breakfast; there was burnt toast, made out of tough bread, that
she'd been trying to eat; and a cup of tea, half drunk; something
the matter with that, I presume. I'd have made her some gruel, if
there'd been a fire; and if there'd been any kindlings, I'd have
made her a fire; but there 'twas; there wasn't any bottom to it!"

"You had better make the gruel here, Luclarion."

"That's what I come back for. But--Mrs. Ripwinkley!"

"Well?"

"Don't it appear to you it's a kind of a stump? I don't want to do
it just for the satisfaction; though it _would_ be a satisfaction to
plough everything up thorough, and then rake it over smooth; what do
you think?"

"What have you thought, Luclarion? Something, of course."

"She wants a real smart girl--for two dollars a week. She can't get
her, because she ain't. And I kind