"If you could see it!"
"I mean if I could feel it."
"If you don't feel it, then 'tisn't well."
"It can't be well because we've got no family. 'Tis a grievance--and a just grievance. But yet 'tis well with me none the less, Bartley. The real way to be happy is never to look at home too much. Perhaps, better still, never to look at home at all. By 'home' I mean a person's own heart. Keep out of that and always be busy for other people. Then you haven't time to be miserable."
He shook his head.
"We've all got time for that; there's always the night," he answered. "Nature gives us the night time for sleep, and life takes a big slice out of it for trouble."
"I ought to understand him by now. But 'tis the ups and downs I never can get used to," she explained. "My dear man will be a husband in a thousand now and again, and I'll thank God in my prayers and say to myself as he understands my poor feeble nature at last, and that we never shan't see a cloud again; then he's off and hidden away behind himself for months at a time, and I can't win a smile from him or hardly a good word."
"He's so ambitious."
"No doubt 'tis that. 'Twas Rhoda herself got him into his good way last time; and a right glad week we had of it. Then there came all this over his mind. Somehow he can't bring himself to ask my advice over anything bigger than his own clothes. He lets me choose them, bless him. That's something."
"And jolly smart he always looks. But mind this, Madge, you talk of ups and downs. That's no hardship--'tis the natural, healthy state, like the ebb of the river in summer drought and the seasons coming round one after the other. You can't have ups without downs, and if you want one you must brave the other."