I looked at her anxiously, and the bare thought that she might die and leave me alone was so terrible that I could hardly help crying out. And I saw, as by a flash of lightning, that if God took her from me, I could not, should not say: Thy will be done.
But she was better after taking a few drops of lavender, and what color she has came back to her dear sweet face.
APRIL 12.-Dr. Cabot's letter has lost all its power over me. A stone has more feeling than I. I don't love to pray. I am sick and tired of this dreadful struggle after holiness; good books are all alike, flat and meaningless. But I must have something to absorb and carry me away, and I have come back to my music and my drawing with new zest. Mother was right in warning me against giving them up. Maria Kelley is teaching me to paint in oil-colors, and says I have a natural gift for it.
APRIL 13.-Mother asked me to go to church with her last evening, and I said I did not want to go. She looked surprised and troubled.
"Are you not well, dear?" she asked.
"I don't know. Yes. I suppose I am. But I could not be still at church five minutes. I am nervous that I feel as if I should fly."
"I see how it is," she said; "you have forgotten that body of yours, of which I reminded you, and have been trying to live as if you were all soul and spirit. You have been straining every nerve to acquire perfection, whereas this is God's gift, and one that He is willing to give you, fully and freely."
"I have done seeking for that or anything else that is good," I said, despondently. "And so I have gone back to my music and everything else."
"Here is just the rock upon which you split," she returned. "You speak of going back to your music as if that implied going away from God. You rush from one extreme to another. The only true way to live in this world, constituted just as we are, is to make all our employments subserve the one great end and aim of existence, namely, to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. But in order to do this we must be wise task-masters, and not require of ourselves what we cannot possibly perform. Recreation we must have. Otherwise the strings of our soul, wound up to an unnatural tension, will break."
"Oh, I do wish," I cried, "that God had given us plain rules, about which we could make no mistake!"