All the older children would have shrunk from an allusion to the great grief of which the beautiful face before them bore so deep an impress, but one of the younger ones said:
“I’m so surprised that you, who are so sad to look at, should have such nice laughing eyes all the same when you speak, and seem so ready to be amused.”
Miss Ross did not answer immediately, her lips framed some words. Only Clare who was nearest to her heard them, for she was speaking to herself:
“And even yet I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain,
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?”
But aloud, she said to the little child who had spoken: “Sorrow and gladness are close together, the more you have it in your nature to suffer, the more thoroughly you can enjoy. And these two things, suffering and gladness, mean a full comprehension of life. The psalmist says, ‘Grant me understanding, and I shall live’ and understanding means the spirit that makes us accept our joys, our duties, and our sorrows; deliberately adjusting ourselves to them, giving them their place.
“It is a good prayer, ‘Help me better to bear my sorrows, and to more fully understand my joys.’ For only when we understand our joys do we find contentment.”
“There’s a poem Mummie read to us once,” said Bimbo, “in which a man tells how he had everything in life to make him happy. He had riches, he had houses, he had talents, he had friends, and lots of fun of every description, but he hadn’t contentment, and wanting that, he wanted all. And so he set out to seek her, and he travelled far and wide, till at last he went home, because he was tired. And there, when he got home, he found her by his own doorstep, sitting spinning!”