“I found myself a proud and honorable gentleman instead, who abhorred meanness, falsehood, dishonesty and the whole catalogue of those sins because they were blots and stains, hideous in my sight. I had no patience with them in that they never tempted me. I liked my life to be pure and just, but it was for myself alone. I did not think of what God might require; the higher aim. After all, it is His relation with every human soul, His holding out the faith and love and atonement to us, made for us so long ago in His great wisdom, and which is for us whether we take it or not. But we want to try our wisdom first.”
“That leads to the trouble and the clashing. We so often set up our own will and when we are buffeted about take it as a sort of direct martyrdom, when it is only a natural result of an ordinary cause. We sometimes cry out—‘Why has God sent this upon me?’ when we bring the trials upon ourselves.”
“Yes. Then we have to go back. We find the plans and specifications and the materials all right, left on the highway, while we used stones and timber of our own, changed the plan according to our liking. We have to take out a good deal of work in this life.”
“And we learn by degrees to be careful, to come to Him, to ask first of all—‘Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?’”
“And learning to follow it, is the great lesson.”
He turned his head a trifle and lapsed into deep thought. Fan glanced over at me in a peculiar manner as if she triumphed in what he said, and it was only proving a well established point. She puzzled me. Why, when she liked him so well herself, was there not the deeper and farther-reaching sympathy of love? He was really nobler than Winthrop Ogden.
We did not have any confidence until late Saturday afternoon. Fan was writing a letter in her room and mamma had gone to visit some sick people. I had Edith fenced off in a corner of the porch and was amusing her while I sewed a little.
He came and studied me curiously. That was what I did not like. If I had been as pretty as Fan, or if my hair were any other color!
“You have not asked me a word about your friend. Have you lost interest in him now that he is delivered over to my keeping?”
I understood whom he meant.