"Uncle Oldways,"—it came out this time in her earnestness, and her strong personal appeal,—"do you think there are some people—whole families of people—who have no business in the reality of things to be at all? Who are all a mistake in the world, and have nothing to do with its meaning? I have got to feeling sometimes lately, as if—I—had never had any business to be."
She spoke slowly—awe-fully. It was a strange speech for a girl in her nineteenth year. But she was a girl in this nineteenth century, also; and she had caught some of the thoughts and questions of it, and mixed them up with her own doubts and unsatisfactions which they could not answer.
"The world is full of mistakes; mistakes centuries long; but it is full of salvation and setting to rights, also. 'The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.' You have been allowed to be, Desire Ledwith. And so was the man that was born blind. And I think there is a colon put into the sentence about him, where a comma was meant to be."
Desire did not ask him, then, what he meant; but she turned to the story after he had gone, and found this:—
"Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be manifest in him."
You can see, if you look also, where she took the colon out, and put the comma in.
Were all the mistakes—the sins, even—for the very sake of the pure blessedness and the more perfect knowledge of the setting right?
Desire began to think that Uncle Oldways' theology might help her.
What she said to him now was,—
"I want to do something. I should like to go and live with Luclarion, I think, down there in Neighbor Street. I should like to take hold of some other lives,—little children's, perhaps,"—and here Desire's voice softened,—"that don't seem to have any business to be, either, and see if I could help or straighten anything. Then I feel is if I should know."