“I cannot, I cannot,” cried the unhappy girl: “I am altogether disappointed in myself; every thing has turned out differently from what I expected; I thought I should have been——” She could not command her voice.
“You thought you should have been something unlike—something far beyond what women generally are. I saw what your ambition was, and, as you well remember, warned you from the first that you mistook the way to gratify it. While you should have been exercising yourself in the virtues you wished to attain, you spent your energies in dreaming about them, and the consequence is——”
“Oh! do not reproach me with it; I know too well what it is. I am fit for nothing—equal to neither great occasions nor small. I am always in the way of other people when they do not want me; and when they do, I fail them utterly. Oh! do not reproach me with all this.”
“Not for the world, my love! What heart could that father have who would reproach you as you reproach yourself? I will allow some truth in what you have said; but I must add, that with so clear an apprehension of the evil as you have shown, and so noble a candour in acknowledging it, there is strong reason for hoping that you may get the better of your troubles entirely.”
“No; I shall never have strength now; you do not know how often I have resolved and failed. I will make no more resolutions, and then I shall not incur the sin of breaking them.”
“Anna, I am now convinced of what I have long feared. What you have just said is more painful to me than all that has passed: it proves to me that you depend on the strength of your unassisted will—that you have ceased to seek help where you know you may ever find it. I see, by your silent shame, that it is so. And have you really made no further use of your religion than to feast your imagination, while you were daily experiencing the weakness of your own will?”
Anna turned away in agony.
“Tell me, my child, if I do you injustice. Give me but one sign that I too have misunderstood you. If you have indeed continued to study the Scriptures with intentness of heart, if you have, to this day, sought relief and strength in prayer, turn to me, and I will entreat your pardon for my harshness.”
Anna turned not, and her emotion was fearful: her father’s was scarcely less.
“It is not too late, be the case what it may: while the stray sheep lives, it may be brought back. But is it possible, that while we have read and prayed together, your heart was far from your lips? Was your fancy busy even then, with the applause of the world?”