“As it takes two to make a quarrel,” I answered, “so it takes two to make a misunderstanding. But one can stop it. Remember that older people have often gone through trials in life that have shaken their nerves and made them sensitive and irritable to little annoyances.”
Marian asked: “Do you mean fussy?”
“Yes,” I said, “and it is easy to understand. But the fact that in many families some of the children get along well with the parents, and others do not, proves that at least some of the responsibility rests with the children.”
We spoke of self-control, of standing, as it were, outside and above ourselves—the idea of aloofness—and not working like a machine for the impulse of the moment. I said I had known people who had this trouble in youth, and stopped it with a strong resolution, because they saw it was a bad, an ugly and a controllable thing. Henry spoke of the old plan of counting a hundred before saying anything. We none of us liked the idea, possibly because we were tired of it; I said, for one, that I did not see how counting a hundred could make me change my mind, whereas thinking might. I said the best plan was to put one’s self at once, as it were, inside the other person, and then one could not possibly say the disagreeable thing. Henry, it seems, has only one difficulty, that of wanting to express or keep his own opinion at the expense of contradicting his elders. I said one had always the right to express one’s opinion, but one might also do it as an opinion, say “I think,” or “I believe”; that one might always consider how the thing said would impress the person listening. Marian spoke of people who irritate you by their presence, whom you dislike and who grate on you, no matter what they may do or say. Then I told them of the saving sense of humor; how, if we resolve to be amused by people in a pleasant, genial way, to see the humor in human life, we may avoid being hurt by them or hurting them in return.
Virginia especially agreed with me, cited incidents of being amused by the disagreeable, and spoke of Dickens as one who could be amused by all sorts of people, even the most “bromidic” or disagreeable. Marian said Dickens was amused by every one but his heroes and heroines. They almost always seemed a hardship to him and to others.
I said we must use every one for our good. That word to “use people” had been employed in a bad sense, but I meant it in a good sense.
“Whenever you are with any one you don’t like, think at once what you can get out of that meeting. Every human being has something for you, and you for him. Self always wants to find self.”
Marian and Ruth immediately thought of people from whom they could get nothing. Virginia, who does get something from everything, remarked that some people seemed to have very little self.
“To be a human being at all,” I answered, “how much of self one must have, compared with the animals!”
“I suppose,” said she; “that is why some people, who have not much, remind me of animals.”