One of the hardest things about trying to be good, particularly about trying to be better, for that means getting out of bad ways as well as getting into good ones, is the dreadful persistence of bad habits. Even when your heart is quite, quite in earnest, and your mind too, and often at the very time you’re planning beautifully about keeping your new resolutions, and quite bubbling over with eagerness about them, you get a sudden shock, just as if you had walked straight into a bath of cold water that you didn’t know was there—and oh, dear, you stop to find you have done the exact wrong or foolish thing you had been fixing so to avoid.
How many times this happened to me about the new resolutions I wrote of in the last chapter I should be afraid to say. Sometimes it was almost laughable. One morning I remember I was busy writing down one or two rules I had thought might help me, when I heard mamma’s voice calling me.
“Bother,” I said to myself in my old way, “I shall never remember about the third rule, if I leave it just now.”
And I went on calmly writing, just calling to mamma, “Yes, yes, I’ll come directly;” and so absorbed was I, that when, a full quarter of an hour afterwards, I happened to glance out of the window, and saw mamma hot and out of breath from a chase after my new Persian kitten, who had escaped through the conservatory and might very easily have got lost or stolen, or even killed, it never struck me that I might have saved her this trouble. Trouble on my account, too!
“What is the matter, mamma?” I exclaimed as I ran out, half crossly, for I could not bear to see her so tired and breathless. “How you do fuss—why didn’t you make the servants fetch Persica in?”
“My dear,” said mamma, as gently as if I had any right to find fault with her, “you know she won’t come to any one but you or me; and I did call you.”
How ashamed I felt! I tore up the rules, and called them nasty things in my own mind, which was exceedingly silly. Afterwards, when I had had more talk with Yvonne, and Mary, I made some others. Not half such grand ones. Only very, very simple ones, which I almost despised on that account; but they were useful to me, by showing me that, simple as they were, it was no easy matter to keep them, even for a few hours at a time.
You see I had been selfish all my life. I had never even thought of its being wrong. Once I did begin to think about it, I was perfectly startled and horrified to find how wide-spreading and deep-rooted my selfishness was. I should often have lost heart altogether had it not been for my new friends. Not that they ever “preached” to me or to anybody, it was just the seeing and feeling how different they were, from what a different point of view they looked at everything, that made me understand better where I was wrong, and take courage to go on trying. And now and then nice things happened to make me feel I was getting on a little; some of these I will tell you about, though I have also to tell you of some rather dreadful things that showed how very naughty and horrid—oh! I get hot still when I think of one of these—I still was.
It was not only selfishness I had to fight against I was exceedingly, absurdly, really vulgarly self-conceited and stuck-up. I don’t think Evey and Mary really ever knew the worst of me; for one thing, I began to try almost from the first of knowing them; for another, just as an honest person cannot believe, and never suspects another of dishonesty till he is actually forced to do so, the dear Whytes were too sincere and simple and single-minded to understand or take in my ridiculous vanity and affectations.