"You make me feel awful, Jane. As if I'd been lazy, staying in bed so. And it was the only way."
"You couldn't do any better, Auntie. At least you weren't doing anything wrong. Being moored in a little, quiet cove is better than being adrift and slamming into the boats of others."
"I'd really have had to think more about Matilda's thoughts than my own, if I'd known. I'd never have had time for much thinking as I pleased in the way you say; I was always jumping up and flopping down."
"Jane," said Emily earnestly, "then every thought matters?"
"Yes, or matterates." Jane smiled. "If a thought doesn't produce good, it'll surely produce bad,—it's got to do something. You plant your thoughts in time just as one plants seed in the ground, and any further thoughts of the same kind add to its strength until enough strength causes an appearance in this world."
"You really believe that?"
"I know it. I know it so well that I think that every seed that's ever fallen was a lesson that we were too stupid to learn. Every time a seed fell and germinated, God said: 'There, that's the very plainest teaching on earth. Can't you see?' Sometimes I think the world's all a book for us to learn heaven in, just as our bodies explain our souls to us."
Susan looked at Emily in an awed way. "I guess I can get to believe it all," she said, in a low tone; "it sounds so plain when you stop and think of it."
"I'll try to believe it," said Emily, "but what I care most about is to learn how to get what you want?"
Jane considered. "That comes ever so far along. You have to learn to get what you want out of yourself before you can be upon the plane where you naturally get what you want, because you are too far on to want what you couldn't get."