"Perhaps you need to know God, to know Christ?"
She looked disappointed and tired. So I came away, first promising, at her request, to go to see her again. I found Ernest just driving up, and told him what had passed. He listened in his usual silence, and I longed to have him say whether I had spoken wisely and well.
JUNE 1.-I have been to see Miss Clifford again and made mother go with me. Miss Clifford took a fancy to her at once.
"Ah!" she said, after one glance at the dear, loving face, "nobody need tell me that you are good and kind. But I am a little afraid of good people. I fancy they are always criticising me and expecting me to imitate their perfection."
"Perfection does not exact perfection," was mother's answer. "I would rather be judged by an angel than by a man." And then mother led her on, little by little, and most adroitly, to talk of herself and of her state of health. She is an orphan and lives in this great, stately house alone with her servants. Until she was laid aside by the state pf her health, she lived in the world and of it. Now she is a prisoner, and prisoners have time to think.
"Here I sit," she said, "all day long. I never was fond of staying at home, or of reading, and needlework I absolutely hate. In fact, I do not know how to sew."
"Some such pretty, feminine work might beguile you of a few of the long hours of these long days," said mother. "One can't be always reading."
"But a lady came to see me, a Mrs. Goodhue, one of your good sort, I suppose, and she preached me quite a sermon on the employment of time. She said I had a solemn admonition of Providence, and ought to devote myself entirely to religion. I had just begun to be interested in a bit of embroidery, but she frightened me out of it. But I can't bear such dreadfully good people, with faces a mile long."
Mother made her produce the collar, or whatever it was, showed her how to hold her needle and arrange her pattern, and they both got so absorbed in it that I had leisure to look at some of the beautiful things with which the room was full.
"Make the object of your life right," I heard mother say, at last, "and these little details will take care of themselves."