"Everything matters. There's nothing in this world that doesn't matter, because this world is all matter. Anything that doesn't matter must be spirit. Don't you see that when you say and really mean that a thing doesn't matter, you mean that to you it isn't material,—that it's no part of your world?"
"Dear me, I never thought of that," said Susan, "then I suppose as long as things do matter to us, it means we just hang on to them and hold them for all we're worth."
"Yes."
"But, Jane, thoughts can't matter much? Or we can forget things."
"There isn't anything that we can think of at all that we are ever free not to think about again—that is, if it's a good thought," said Jane. "If a thought comes to us at all, it comes with some responsibility attached. Either we are meant to gain strength by dismissing it, if it seems wrong, or it's our duty to do something with it, if it's right. Most people's minds are all littered up with thoughts that they never either use or put away. That's what makes them so stupid."
"Goodness!" exclaimed Susan. "Why, I never put a thought away in my life,—not as I know of."
"I've never thought anything at all about my thoughts," said Emily, looking rather startled.
"Lots of people don't," said Jane; "they act just as a woman would in making a dress, if she cut it out a bit now and a bit then without ever laying the pattern back even, and then joined it anywhere any time, and then was surprised when it didn't even prove fit to wear—not to speak of looking all witched."
"Is that what ails some lives?" Emily asked, looking yet more startled.
"It's what ails almost every life. It's what makes 'I didn't think' the worst confession in the world. A man driving a motor with his eyes shut wouldn't be a bit worse. Life's a great powerful force always rushing on, and we swing into the tide and never bother to row or to steer or to see that our boat is water-tight."