"Do you?"
He moved rather uneasily.
"I—I don't know that it is natural to me to lean. Still—still we sometimes do things, get into the habit of doing things, which are not natural to us."
"That's a mistake, I think, unless we do them from a fine motive, from unselfishness, for instance, from the motive of honor, or to strengthen our wills drastically. But I believe we have been provided with a means of knowing how far we ought to pursue a course not wholly natural to us."
"What means?"
"If the at first apparently unnatural thing soon seems quite natural to us, if it becomes, as it were, part of ourselves, if we can incorporate it with ourselves, then we have probably made a step upward. But if it continues to seem persistently unnatural, I think we are going downward. I am one of those who believe in the power called conscience. But I expect you knew that already. Here is Charmian!"
Charmian came in, flushed with the cold outside, her long eyes sparkling, her hands deep in a huge muff.
"Sitting with Madre, Claude!"
"I have been telling her we expect her to come to us in spring."
"Of course we do. That's settled. I found these cuttings in the hall."