“One of us ought to have developed that talent, perhaps,” she said, brightly. “I don’t know why you didn’t. As for myself, I never had the time, and, if I had, the materials would have been beyond my purse. But I like pretty things. I have really often wished that I knew how to make some. You don’t know how to teach me, I suppose?”
“No, indeed; and, if I did, I’m afraid I shouldn’t do it. Nothing ever seemed more utterly insipid to me, though, of course, I never planned any such life as we are having now.”
“Look here,” Susan said, turning suddenly toward her sister, and dropping the paper which she had been reading. “I have a pleasant thought. We are almost tired of all sorts of books; but there is one Book which never wears out. What if this time of absolute and enforced leisure should have been given us in which to get better acquainted with what it says? What if you and I should begin to study the Bible together?”
Ruth looked gloomy.
“I don’t know much about the Bible,” she said; “and I don’t know how to study it. I read a chapter every day, and, of course, I get some help out of it; but I see so much that I don’t understand, and—well, to be frank, so much that it seems to me strange should have been put into the book at all, when necessarily a great deal that we would like to know was left out, that it worries and disappoints me.”
She half expected to shock Susan, and looked toward her with determined eyes, ready to sustain her position, in case an argument was produced. But Susan only answered, with a quiet—
“I know; I used to feel very much in the same way, until I had a light given me to go by, which shone upon some of the verses that had been so dark before.”
There was no lighting up of Ruth’s face.
“I know what you mean,” she said, gravely “You mean that the Bible was a new book to you after you were converted. I have heard a great many people say that, but it doesn’t help me as much as you might suppose it would. Of course it made a new book for me, because the Bible was never anything to me at all, until I was converted. I have passed years without looking into it; indeed, I may say I never read it. When I was a school-girl, I used to find extracts from it in my parsing-book, and some of them seemed to me very lofty sentiments, and several of them I committed to memory, because of the beauty of their construction; but that was the extent of my acquaintance with the book. One of the first things I noticed a Christian say, after I was converted, was about the Bible—what a wonderful book it was to him, and how, every time he read a verse, it opened a new idea. I thought it would be that way with me; but it hasn’t been. I love the Bible; that is, I love certain things which I find in it; but it doesn’t seem to me as I thought it would. I can’t say that I love to study it; or, rather, perhaps I might say I don’t know how to study it. I can memorize verses, of course, and I do, somewhat, when I find one that pleases me; but—well, I never told anyone about it, but it has disappointed me a little.”
Now she had shocked Susan; anyway, she felt sure of it. She had lived long enough, even now, with this plain, quiet sister, to have discovered that the Bible was a great fountain of help to her. She would not be able to understand why it was not the same to Ruth. Neither did Ruth understand it; and, though perhaps she did not realize even this, it was an undertone of longing to get at the secret of the difference between them which prompted her words. But Susan only smiled, in a quiet, unsurprised way, and said: