"Do they?" he asked hazily.
"Why, yes," Pam said, after a moment, just a little shaken in her confidence by his question. "The more you don't want to do a thing, the more you 're glad when you 've gone and done it—a kind thing I mean."
The more you did n't want to do a thing the more you were glad when you 'd gone and done it. How did that apply to him?
"... Father Mostyn says you must beware of doing kindnesses for the mere gratification of being thanked. He says that's a deadly sin—one of the prides of charity. There are a lot more, but that 's the worst. What do you think?"
"What do I think? Gracious!" laughed the Spawer, "I dare n't contradict his Reverence. I think so too."
"But you! You 're quite different from me," the girl objected. "I could n't be kind at all if it were n't for Father Mostyn. All my kindnesses have been taught me by him." Such is the power of loyalty and loving adherence, that transfers its own virtues to the object of affection. "But you. I don't think you can help being kind. Some people can't. You seem to do things from the heart somehow, as though they came naturally to you; but me, I do all mine from the head, because I 've been taught what things are kind and what things are cruel. And often I make mistakes too." She was thinking of the schoolmaster. "But you never do."
Did n't he? What were all his trumpery smiles and petty kindnesses, his smooth words and minor generosities, but little errors of excess in a grand sum of cruelty, that had brought the total to an amount he dared scarcely contemplate, and were compelling him this day to cancel these labyrinthine workings of arithmetic by a wholesale application of the sponge?
"That," said he, looking leniently upon her, "is because your kindness, little woman, won't let you find flaws in mine. But there are flaws in it—great flaws."
"Where?" asked Pam, with the earnestness of a child.
"All over," said the Spawer.