Polly Oliver's Problem

by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

Meanwhile Polly, it must be confessed, was not at the present time quite justifying the good opinion of her friends.

She had few of the passive virtues. She could bear sharp stabs of misfortune, which fired her energy and pride, but she resented pin pricks. She could carry heavy, splendid burdens cheerfully, but she fretted under humble cares. She could serve by daring, but not by waiting. She would have gone to the stake or the scaffold, I think, with tolerable grace; but she would probably have recanted any article of faith if she had been confronted with life-imprisonment.

Trouble that she took upon herself for the sake of others, and out of love, she accepted sweetly. Sorrows that she did not choose, which were laid upon her without her consent, and which were "just the ones she did not want, and did not need, and would not have, and could not bear,"--these sorrows found her unwilling, bitter, and impatient.

Yet if life is a school and we all have lessons to learn in it, the Great Teacher will be unlikely to set us tasks which we have already finished. Some review there must be, for certain things are specially hard to keep in mind, and have to be gone over and over, lest they fade into forgetfulness. But there must be continued progress in a life school. There is no parrot repetition, sing-song, meaningless, of words that have ceased to be vital. New lessons are to be learned as fast as the old ones are understood. Of what use to set Polly tasks to develop her bravery, when she was already brave?

Courage was one of the little jewels set in her fairy crown when she was born, but there was a round, empty space beside it, where Patience should have been. Further along was Daring, making a brilliant show, but again there was a tiny vacancy waiting for Prudence.

The crown made a fine appearance, on the whole, because the large jewels were mostly in place, and the light of these blinded you to the lack of the others; but to the eye of the keen observer there was a want of symmetry and completeness.

Polly knew the unfinished state of her fairy crown as well as anybody else. She could not plead ignorance as an excuse; but though she would have gone on polishing the great gems with a fiery zeal, she added the little jewels very slowly, and that only on compulsion.

There had been seven or eight weeks of partial unconsciousness, when the sorrow and the loneliness of life stole into her waking dreams only vaguely and at intervals; when she was unhappy, and could not remember why; and slept, to wake and wonder and sleep again.

Then there were days and weeks when the labor of living was all that the jaded body could accomplish; when memory was weak; when life began at the pillow, and ended at the foot of the bed, and the universe was bounded by the chamber windows.

But when her strength came back, and she stood in the middle of the floor, clothed and in her right mind, well enough to remember,--oh! then indeed the deep waters of bitterness rolled over poor Polly's head and into her heart, and she sank beneath them without a wish or a struggle to rise.