Lyndsay smiled. This alert grasp of a subject was a novel acquisition. As he was adjusting a fly, and the boat was dropping to a new station, she said:
“I hate pain. I don’t believe in its usefulness. Not for Rose Lyndsay, at least. It only makes me cross.”
“Yet you would hesitate to make a world without it?”
“Yes. One can see the difficulties.”
“The more you think of them the more they multiply. It is, of course, commonplace to say pain is protective, and in a sense educative. That one may admit; and yet there will still be such a lot of torment which is natural that one does keep on wondering why.”
“Do you remember, Pardy,”—this was her nursery name for her father,—“when Mr. Caramel preached about the uses of pain, and said the man who suffered was ignorantly rich: he had only to learn to use his wealth?”
“Oh, very well I remember. As we came out Anne said she would be glad to be generous with her over-competence, and wanted to send Mr. Caramel a few of the crumbs to relieve his too comfortable poverty!”
“Yes, only one can’t repeat her bits of grim fun, Pardy; and when she tells Dick a green-apple stomach-ache is only a joke which he don’t understand, you must see her face and Dick’s grimace.—Oh, see how that fish jumped!”
“North has a curious notion that pain, except for early protective education, is, in a measure, useless. He declares that long bouts of it make men bad.”
“Not Aunt Anne, Pardy.”