Bessie looked mightily glad. "If you will let me help you, Harry, you will make me happy," said she. "What is it about?"
"It is a story, for your comfort—a true story. I could not devise a plot, so I fell back on a series of pathetic facts. Life is very sad, Bessie. Why are we so fond of it?"
"We take it in detail, as we take the hours of the day and the days of the year, and it is very endurable. It has seemed to me sometimes that those whom we call fortunate are the least happy, and that the hard lot is often lifted into the sphere of blessedness. Consider Mr. and Mrs. Moxon; they appear to have nothing to be thankful for, and yet in their devotion to one another what perfect peace and consolation!"
"Oh, Bessie, but it is a dreadful fate!" said Harry. "Poor Moxon! who began life with as fine hopes and as solid grounds for them as any man,—there he is vegetating at Littlemire still, his mind chiefly taken up with thinking whether his sick wife will be a little more or a little less suffering to-day than she was yesterday."
"I saw them last week, and could have envied them. She is as near an angel as a woman can be; and he was very contented in the garden, giving lessons to a village boy in whom he has discovered a genius for mathematics. He talked of nothing else."
"Poor boy! poor genius! And are we to grow after the Moxons' pattern, Bessie—meek, patient, heavenly?" said Harry.
"By the time our hair is white, Harry, I have no objection, but there is a long meanwhile," replied Bessie with brave uplooking face. "We have love between us and about us, and that is the first thing. The best pleasures are the cheapest—we burden life with too many needless cares. You may do as much good in an obscure groove of the world as you might do if your name was in all men's mouths. I don't believe that I admire very successful people."
"That is lucky for us both, since I am a poor fellow whose health has given way—who is never likely to have any success at all."
"You don't know, Harry; but this is not the time to remember pride and ambition—it is the time to recover all the health and strength you can; and with them hope and power will return. What do you most enjoy in the absence of work?"
"Fresh air, fine scenery, and the converse of men. To live plainly is no hardship to me; it would be a great hardship to fall on lower associations, which is the common destiny of the poor and decayed scholar. You will save me, Bessie?"