‘There it is, I believe,’ said Guy, stopping and considering, then going on with a better satisfied air, ‘that is a real rule. Not to be so bent on myself as to sacrifice other people’s feelings to what seems best for me. But I don’t see whose pleasure I interfered with.’
Amy could have answered, ‘Mine;’ but the maidenly feeling checked her again, and she said, ‘We all thought you would like it.’
‘And I had no right to sacrifice your pleasure! I see, I see. The pleasure of giving pleasure to others is so much the best there is on earth, that one ought to be passive rather than interfere with it.’
‘Yes,’ said Amy, ‘just as I have seen Mary Ross let herself be swung till she was giddy, rather than disappoint Charlotte and Helen, who thought she liked it.’
‘If one could get to look at everything with as much indifference as the swinging! But it is all selfishness. It is as easy to be selfish for one’s own good as for one’s own pleasure; and I dare say, the first is as bad as the other.’
‘I was thinking of something else,’ said Amy. ‘I should think it more like the holly tree in Southey. Don’t you know it? The young leaves are sharp and prickly, because they have so much to defend themselves from, but as the tree grows older, it leaves off the spears, after it has won the victory.’
‘Very kind of you, and very pretty, Amy,’ said he, smiling; ‘but, in the meantime, it is surely wrong to be more prickly than is unavoidable, and there is the perplexity. Selfish! selfish! selfish! Oneself the first object. That is the root.’
‘Guy, if it is not impertinent to ask, I do wish you would tell me one thing. Why did you think it wrong to go to that ball?’ said Amy, timidly.
‘I don’t know that I thought it wrong to go to that individual ball,’ said Guy; ‘but my notion was, that altogether I was getting into a rattling idle way, never doing my proper quantity of work, or doing it properly, and talking a lot of nonsense sometimes. I thought, last Sunday, it was time to make a short turn somewhere and bring myself up. I could not, or did not get out of the pleasant talks as Laura does, so I thought giving up this ball would punish me at once, and set me on a new tack of behaving like a reasonable creature.’
‘Don’t call yourself too many names, or you won’t be civil to us. We all, except Laura, have been quite as bad.’