There are, however, limits to all human endurance. To suffer and be strong is possible to many: to suffer and be silent is within the power of but few. Hazard had resolved never to speak of his love; but no one can judge the strength of a resolution until it has been tried by opportunity. There suddenly rushed over him a wave of boyish despair. One who voluntarily renounces pursuit, generally believes that he might have won; and to Hazard his act seemed the renunciation of a prize surely his.
"Life is so hard!" he burst out suddenly, with all the hopelessness of despairing twenty.
"Oh, no!" Patty returned lightly. "As Flossy says, 'life would be very pleasant, if it were not so much trouble to live.'"
"But to live is so much trouble," he answered. "See what a life I've had! I wasn't asked if I wanted it; and, when I had been made to live, I didn't have my choice about it, in any way. You know that my father was a constant trouble to us,—everybody knew that,—and we all had to endure to be pitied; and pity is always half contempt."
"O Hazard!"
"Of course I don't mean from you," he said illogically enough; "but it is the truth. Then, mother was just worn into her grave by grief and poverty; and we boys had to stand by helpless, and see it."
Patty was at a loss how to answer him, and wisely said little. Hazard was usually so bright, and seemed of so happy a disposition, that this outburst was the more bewildering. Ignorant of the cause which had worked his old pains to the surface, Patty's only thought was of how deep must have been the sorrow of his boyhood to have left so much bitterness behind. She knew in a vague way that Mr. Breck had been a dissipated, unprincipled man, who had ill-treated his family, and been a scandal to the neighborhood until he moved out of it to take up his residence in Boston. She had no means of knowing how sad a childhood had been that of Hazard,—a life so shaded, that only an unusually fine temperament, and the noble disposition inherited from his mother, had prevented his becoming morbidly gloomy. Partly because she knew not what to say, and partly from an instinctive feeling that talking would relieve Hazard's overwrought mood, she let him continue.
"I have never had any good from life for myself," he went on with increasing vehemence, "and I am sure I have never helped my friends to any. I've been a dead weight on those I wanted most to help; and, if I am ever fond of anybody, we are either separated, or something happens to spoil our friendship. Frank and I never had any thing in common; and now he is all the time plaguing Ease Apthorpe, or travelling about with that vile Mixon."
"Who is Mixon?" asked Patty. "Not Bathalina's husband?"
"Yes: that's the one. The old scoundrel!"