The suggestion seemed to startle her.
“You speak very confidently, Doctor.”
“With the confidence of one who makes diseases and their cure his study. I know something of the human soul as well as the human body, and of the maladies to which both are subjected. A cure is hopeless in either case, unless the patient will accept the remedy. Pain of body is the indicator of disease, and gives warning that an enemy to life has found a lodgment; pain of mind is the same phenomenon, only showing itself in a higher sphere, and for the same purpose. If you are unhappy, surrounded by all this elegance, and with the means of gratifying every orderly wish, it shows that an enemy to your soul has entered through some unguarded gateway. You cannot get rid of this enemy by any change of place, or by any new associations. Society will not help you. The excitement of shows; gauds, glitter, pageants; the brief triumphs gained in fashionable tournaments, will not expel this foe of your higher and nobler life, but only veil, for brief seasons, his presence from your consciousness. When these are past, and you retire into yourself, then comes back the pain, the languor, the excessive weariness. Is it not so, Delia? Is not this your sad experience?”
I paused. Her eyes had fallen to the floor. She sat very still, like one who was thinking deeply.
“The plodding housekeeper, whose picture you drew just now—humble, even mean in your regard though she be—sinks to peaceful sleep when her tasks are done, and rises refreshed at coming dawn. If she is happier than your fine lady, whose dainty hands cannot bear the soil of these common things, why? Ponder this subject, Delia. It concerns you deeply. It is the happiest state in life that we all strive to gain; but you may lay it up in your heart as immutable truth, that happiness never comes to any one, except through a useful employment of all the powers which God has given to us. The idle are the most miserable—and none are more miserable in their ever-recurring ennuied hours, than your fashionable idlers. We see them only in their holiday attire, tricked out for show, and radiant in reflected smiles. Alas! If we could go back with them to their homes, and sit beside them, unseen, in their lonely hours, would not pity fill our hearts? My dear young friend! Turn your feet aside from this way—it is the path that leads to unutterable wretchedness.”
The earnestness of my manner added force to what I said, and constrained at least a momentary conviction.
“You speak strongly, Doctor,” she said, with the air of one who could not look aside from an unpleasant truth.
“Not too strongly, Delia. Is it not as I have said? Are not your mere society-ladies too often miserable at home?”
She sighed heavily, as if unpleasant images were forcing themselves upon her mind. I felt that I might follow up the impression I had made, and resumed:
“There was a time, Delia—and it lies only three or four short years backward on your path of life—when I read in your opening mind a promise of higher things than have yet been attained—you must pardon the freedom of an old but true friend. A time when thought, taste, feeling were all building for themselves a habitation, the stones whereof were truths, and the decorations within and without pure and good affections. All this”—I glanced at the rich furniture, mirrors, and curtains—“is poor and mean to that dwelling place of the soul, the foundations for which you once commenced laying. Are you happier now than then? Have the half bewildering experiences through which you have passed satisfied you that you are in the right way? That life's highest blessings are to be found in these pageantries? Think, think, my dear young friend! Look inwards. Search into your heart, and try the quality of its motives. Examine the foundation upon which you are building, and if it is sand, in heaven's name stop, and look for solid earth on which to place the corner stone of your temple of happiness.”