“I suppose what happened to Gladys last night was one of the things you were talking about when you wanted us to be patient, wasn’t it?”
“What do you mean, Dolly?”
“Why, when you said that pride went before a fall, and that she’d be sure to have something unpleasant happen if we only let her alone, and didn’t try to get even ourselves?”
“Well, it looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t get much satisfaction out of seeing people punished that way, though,” admitted Dolly, after a moment’s thought. “It seems to me—well, listen, Miss Eleanor. Suppose someone did something awfully nice for me. It wouldn’t be right, would it, for me just to say to myself, ‘Oh, well, something nice will happen to her.’ She might have some piece of good fortune, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I’d want to do something nice myself to show that I was grateful.”
“Of course you would,” said Eleanor, who saw the point Dolly was trying to make and admired her power of working out a logical proposition.
“Well, then, if that’s true, why shouldn’t it be true if someone does something hateful to me? I don’t take any credit for the pleasant things that happen to people who are nice to me, so why should I feel satisfied because the hateful ones have some piece of bad luck that I didn’t have anything to do with, either?”
“That’s a perfectly good argument as far as it goes, Dolly. But the trouble is that it doesn’t go far enough. You’ve got a false step in it. Can’t you see where she goes wrong, Bessie?”
“I think I can, Miss Eleanor,” said Bessie. “It’s that we ought not to be glad when people are in trouble, even if they are mean to us, isn’t it? But we are glad, and ought to be, when nice people have good luck. So the two cases aren’t the same a bit, are they?”
“Right!” said Eleanor, heartily. “Think that over a bit, Dolly. You’ll see the point pretty soon, and then maybe you’ll understand the whole business better.”