Maggie will scarcely speak to me to-day. She is looking her prettiest, not sulky and disagreeable, like most people when they are vexed, but pensively grave, with just a little heightening of colour, and a shy serious droop in her grey eyes which suits them to perfection. Nona, taking her cue from Maggie, is blunt, almost pert: and Elfie looks pinched and miserable.
Of course I know the reason. Yesterday afternoon I refused permission for Popsie to practise in the schoolroom, while I was giving a lesson on Grecian history to the twins and Thyrza. Miss Millington had kept her upstairs during the usual time for her scale-playing, and desired that she might do it later instead. I sent a kind message, saying I was sorry that it could not be. A small thunder-cloud has brooded in the air ever since. "Millie" was doleful at tea, and she and Maggie shared grievances till twelve o'clock at night, in Miss Millington's room.
But for Miss Millington, I do think my difficulties here would soon lessen. I do not wish to make too much of her conduct. She is what some people wrongly call "sensitive;" that is, she has a susceptible temper, and is always imagining slights. I believe she had delicate health in childhood, which too often means a more or less spoiling preparation for after-life. Whether or no that is the chief cause, I do find her a difficult little person to get on with comfortably. The friction is incessant.
One cannot expect to go through life without some rubs; and no doubt there are faults on both sides. Very likely I am a trouble to her, as well as she to me. I do not exactly see how I could follow any different line of conduct: but perhaps nothing is harder than to weigh dispassionately one's own conduct, above all one's own bearing, towards another, in such a case as this. We are each in a somewhat ticklish position: and then, is not compatibility of temper to smooth matters down.
It often strikes me as remarkable how almost everybody has to do with somebody else who is incompatible, somebody more or less trying, vexing, worrying; not, of course, always with only one. And I often wonder whether this ought to be viewed at all as an accidental circumstance; still less as a subject for regret and complaint.
Trial must be trial, in whatever shape it comes; and I do feel that one is always free to pray for its removal, if God so wills. But this is our time of probation and battling. It is far more essential for us to learn patience and forbearance than to glide smoothly through life. And I cannot at all see how, if there were nothing to try our tempers, we ever could become patient or forbearing. Untried good-humour is not patience: any more than the stillness of ocean on a breezeless day is rigidity. And the very word "forbearance" implies the existence of something which must be borne.
May it not be that our Father does deliberately so place us one with another, side by side—those who are not suited, not compatible—for this very reason, that we may have the opportunity to conquer ourselves, to vanquish our hasty and impatient tempers, as we never could if He allowed us to be only among those who can become so intensely dear to us, that yielding to them must become a pleasure, not a pain at all?
I don't know whether this sentence would be quite clear to anybody else reading my journal: but it is very clear to myself what I mean. There are such different kinds and degrees of love. So often we love or try to love another, merely because of circumstances, because we ought, because we are thrown together, because we are related. So seldom we love soother with pure and heart-whole devotion, entirely because of what he or she is.
If things be thus, "Millie" is certainly my foremost opportunity for patience in life just now, and very likely I am hers.
Looking upon the matter in such a light ought, I think, to make a great difference to one. For, instead of feeling annoyed and worried at everything she says and does, I shall understand that my Father is setting me a lesson in patience and quietness of spirit, which has to be learnt.