"Well, I won't be dishonest with myself, I am sure of that," said Kit. "Just now I have a horror of what—of what is past. But how can I know from what it springs? It may be only because the terrible consequences are still vivid to me. I have been wicked all my life—it is no use pretending otherwise. I have never tried to do good or to be good. Well, I get paid out for a bad thing I have done. Is it not most probable that I have a horror of it only because the punishment is very fresh to me?"
"That is something," said Lily. "If punishment makes you detest what you did, it is doing its work."
"Ah, but the burglar who is caught doesn't detest burglary, really. He may not commit it again, but that is a very different matter. You beat a dog for chasing a cat; when it sees a cat next time, it probably will put its tail down, but you have not eradicated its tendencies, or changed its nature."
Kit paused. She was groping about helplessly in her dim-lit soul.
"You are a good woman, Lily," she said. "You don't and you can't understand a person like me. Oh, my dear, I should never have got through it but for you! I want to be good—before God, I believe I want to be good, but I don't know what it means. I can only say that I will not do certain things again. But how feeble is that! I want to see Ted again—oh, how I want to!—but I believe that I want not to. Is that any good? I want to love Jack again. I did once, indeed I did, and I want him to love me. That is hopeless: he never will."
Lily was puzzled. Kit's difficulties seemed, somehow, so elementary that explanation was impossible. But she knew that it was only through the acknowledgment and the facing of them that her salvation lay. Kit was a child in matters of morals, and perfectly undeveloped; but, luckily, plain simplicity is the one means by which to approach children. Tact, finesse, all the qualities which Kit had and she had not were unneeded here.
"Kit, dear, it doesn't matter, so to speak, whether Jack loves you or not," she said. "Anyhow, it doesn't concern what you must do. Oh, you will not find things easy, and I never heard that one was intended to. You will find a thousand things you want to do, and must not, a thousand things you must do which are hard—harder than the old bazaar-opening, Kit. I am assuming, of course, that, on the whole, you want to be good. There is the great thing, broadly stated."
Kit nodded her head.
"I don't know. I suppose I do," she said.