"She wants to help us make them, and she was telling me she'd like me to cut them a little more carefully than I did the last time I helped her. You'd never think Aunt Sue has a hobby, would you?"
"No, I don't think I should."
"Well, she has. She's the most particular old darling about little things that you ever saw. Now those sandwiches I made I will admit were not cut very evenly, but, dear me! they tasted good enough. Tom Canton ate six. I told her so, but she said they should have looked good, too."
"Well, what's her hobby?"
"I just told you. It's trifles. She says life is made of them, and trifles with the rough edges polished off make beautiful lives. And she loves to quote such things as, 'Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.' She says trifles decide almost everything for us, and shape our characters. She says it is interesting to study how most big things grow from little ones.
"Helen, I think she's right." Mary's dark, thoughtful eyes looked into her friend's.
"O, I don't! It isn't trifles, trifles, that decide things and make the real difference. It is the big things. For instance, it is brother Tom's education in the school of technology that placed him in the responsible position we are all so proud of him for obtaining."
"Yes, but I heard him say himself that he just happened, by mistake, to leave one of his scribbled figures on your uncle's desk, and your uncle, picking it up by mistake, too, said that a boy who could do that should have a chance at the right training."
"Why, that's a fact, Mary mine," said Helen, in surprise. "I never thought of it in that way. Well, I won't agree that it happens so often. For example,"—glancing about for an idea, she caught sight of a young man, a former schoolmate, passing just in front of the Armour home,—"for example, I don't suppose it was a trifle that made Alson Jarvis turn out the kind of individual he has become lately. He used to be a fine boy, but I am afraid he is getting dissipated. He doesn't go with our crowd much now. I guess he is not invited the way he used to be before he began going with those South Town boys."
"I wish I could prove to you my side of the argument. Let's try your Aunt Sue's idea of studying how the big things come from little ones. Wouldn't it be interesting to find the cause of this one case? I would not be one bit surprised if it were just some little thing which was the pivot that turned him."