"
"But do you think it is the best?"
"I think, Emmy, that you will never be satisfied until you have tried it,
and it's worth the money to me to have you feel that you have done your
best."
Mrs. Valentin sighed. "Sometimes I wonder why we do cling to that old
fetich of the East. Why can't we accept the fact that we are Western
people? The question is, Shall we be the self-satisfied kind or the
unsatisfied kind? Shall we be contented and limited, or discontented and
grow?"
"I guess we shall be limited enough, either way," Mr. Valentin retorted
easily. He had no hankering for the East and no grudge against fate for
making him a Western man _malgre lui_. "I've known kickers who didn't
appear to grow much, except to grow cranky," he said.
Up to the moment of actual departure, Mrs. Valentin had continued to review
her decision and to agonize over its possibilities of disaster; but now
that the journey had begun, she was experiencing the rest of change and
movement. She was as responsive as a child to fresh outward impressions,
and the hyperbolical imagination that caused her such torture when it
wrought in the dark hours on the teased fabric of her own life, could
give her compensating pleasures by daylight, on the open roads of the
world.
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