“Barbara, my dear,” he began, looking at her over his spectacles, “I have a kind of confession to make to you.”
“Another one!” thought Barbara.
“When you came home last June, things were a little hard for you, and seemed still harder, didn’t they?”
“Well, rather!” said Barbara, slangily.
“Your point of view was young and uncompromising, and—yes—rather toploftical.”
“I know it.”
Her father smiled. “You surveyed the world from a collegiate summit, and found it woefully lacking. Well, so it is lacking, but all the advice from all the lofty heights in the world will never make it better. We must come down into the plain, and struggle with the common herd, and help to raise it by our individual effort; glad to be a living, toiling part of great humanity, like every one else; never the isolated, censorious onlooker who does not share the common lot. This is one of the hardest lessons for youth to learn, and I have watched you learn it, during all these long, hard months.”
“If I only have really learned it!” put in Barbara.
“I have stood aside,” her father continued. “Sometimes I did not help you, even when I might, and you thought me undiscerning or abstracted. Barbara, my dear, you have done it all yourself, and I am very, very proud of my firstborn.”