“You would not like to be me, Bessie.”
“What an ungrammatical sentence! Poor little me! I should think not; I could not breathe freely in such a confined atmosphere. Why don’t you give it up and let yourself alone? I would not be only a bundle of fears and feelings if I were you.”
“Oh, it is easy to talk, but it is not quite so easy to be good.”
“I am not asking you to be good. We can’t make ourselves good, Hatty; that lies in different hands. But why don’t you look on your unhappy nature as your appointed cross, and just bear with yourself as much as you expect others to bear with you? Why not exercise the same patience as you expect to be shown to you?”
“I hardly understand you, Bessie. I ought to hate myself for my ill-temper and selfishness, ought I not?”
“It seems to me that there are two sorts of hatred, and only one of them is right. We all have two natures. Even an apostle could say, ‘Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ Even St. Paul felt the two natures warring within him. How can you and I, then, expect to be exempt from this conflict?”
“Don’t put yourself in the same category with me, Bessie. You have crushed your lower nature, if you ever had it.”
“Oh, hush!” replied her sister, quite shocked at this. “You can’t know what you are talking about.” And here her voice trembled a little, for no one was more conscious of her faults and shortcomings. Bessie could remember the time when the conflict had been very hard; when her standard of duty had been lower than that she held now; when she had been as careless and indifferent as many girls of her age, until Divine guidance had led her feet into better paths; and knowing this, in her humility she could be tolerant of others.
“You do not know what you are saying, Hatty, or you would not hurt me by such a speech; it is only your love for me that blinds you. What I want to tell you is this—that you must not be so impatient; you waste all your strength in saying hard things about yourself, instead of fighting your faults. Why don’t you say to yourself, ‘I am a poor, weak little creature, but my Creator knows that too, and he bears with me. I cannot rid myself of my tiresome nature; it sticks to me like a Nessus shirt‘—you know the old mythological story, Hatty—‘but it is my cross, a horrid spiky one, so I will carry it as patiently as I can. If it is not always light, I will grope my way through the shadows; but my one prayer and my one effort shall be to prevent other people suffering through me?’”
“Oh, Bessie, that is beautiful!”