She was delayed in her return, growing more and more anxious at the thought of his anxiety. When she boarded the south-bound train, she went down the aisle, looking for a seat, with her short steps hurried as if it would get her home sooner.
Mrs. Grey leaned over and motioned her, and as she sat down, looked critically at the bright eyes and pink cheeks. “You certainly do look well nowadays, Bessie.”
Doubtless Bessie's color was partly excitement and rush.
“Oh, I'm well,” absently.
“Funny kind of dyspepsia, wasn't it, to be cured by eating around, the way you have to do.”
“Oh, dyspepsia!” The nettles brought back her attention. People needn't belittle her troubles! “I still have that dyspepsia. But if you had to be as busy as I, Mrs. Grey, you'd know that there are times when nothing but sudden death can interfere.” Even Mrs. Grey's prickings, however, were washed over to-day by Balm of Gilead. “Still, it has come to something. The company has given me Cincinnati for my territory.”
“Really?” Not that Mrs. Grey doubted her veracity. “Well, you always did succeed at anything you put your hand to. It has been the most surprising thing! You know, I tell everybody, Bessie, that you deserve all the credit in the world for the way you have taken hold.” Bessie stiffened; neither need they sympathize too much! “A girl brought up as you were, who always had the best of everything.” The best of everything! The familiar phrase was like a bell, sending wave after wave of memory singing through Bessie's mind. “And still I never saw any one to whom the wind has been so tempered as to you: when you were sick you could afford it, and now that it's inconvenient—Things always did seem to work smoother with you, and come out better, than with any of the rest of us.”
Bessie sat looking at her, and, in the speech, saw her own petulance of a moment before—any number of her own speeches, in fact, inverted, as things are in a glass. Indeed, Mrs. Grey had held up a reflector. Bessie had met herself. And she saw herself, as in a mirror-maze, from all angles, down diminishing perspectives, from the woman she was to the girl she had been.
She had been quite unconscious of the slow transformation in her habits of thought. It is so in life. One toils up the thickly wooded hillside, intent only on the footing, and comes suddenly on a high clearing, overlooking valley and path, defining a new horizon.
“I never had the best of everything, Mrs. Grey,” she said. “Nobody has. Every life and every situation in life has its bad conditions—and its good ones. I haven't had any more happiness—nor trouble than most people. It strikes me things are pretty equally divided. We only think they aren't when we don't know all about it. We see the surface of other people's lives, not their private drawbacks or compensations. There are always both. But other people's troubles are so much easier to bear than our own, their good luck so much less deserved and qualified! With all I had as a girl I didn't have contentment. And now, with all I lack, I don't know any one with whom I'd change places.”