"But you are not listening to me. Come now, what are you thinking about, my dear little girl?"
"I'm not thinking about anything. I was trying to remember. Dreams, you know—it isn't really like that—it was—I don't remember. Ah!"
She broke off suddenly, with a pang of sharp pain.
"Does it hurt you, Renée?"
She did not answer, and M. Mauperin could not help his lips moving, as he looked up with an expression of revolt.
"Poor father," said Renée, after a few minutes. "You see I'm resigned. No, we ought not to be so angry with pain. It is sent to us for some reason. We are not made to suffer simply for the sake of suffering."
And in a broken voice, stopping continually to get breath, she began talking to him of all the good sides of suffering, of the wells of tenderness it opens up in us, of the delicacy of heart, and the gentleness of character that it gives to those who accept its bitterness without allowing themselves to get soured by it.
She spoke to him of all the meannesses and the pettinesses that go away from us when we suffer; of the tendency to sarcasm which leaves us, and the unkind laughter which we restrain; of the way in which we give up finding pleasure in other people's little miseries, and of the indulgence that we have for every one.
"If you only knew," she said, "what a stupid thing wit seems to me now." And M. Mauperin heard her expressing her gratitude to suffering as a proof of election. She spoke of selfishness and of all the materiality in which robust health wraps us up; of that hardness of heart which is the result of the well-being of the body; and she told him what ease and deliverance come with sickness; how light she felt inwardly and what aspirations it brings with it for something outside ourselves.
She spoke, too, of suffering as an ill which takes our pride away, which reminds us of our infirmity, which makes us humane, causes us to feel with all those who suffer, and which instils charity into us.