“You make me afraid when you talk to me like that—and yet you make me glad!” the girl responded wonderingly.
“I’ve learned it by bitter experience, dear—my philosophy. I’ve told you something of my story: how I started life a poor girl in a village up in Vermont. My father and mother were never able to see beyond the village sky line. Life and the outside world terrified them. Forever they were telling me ‘You can’t!’ Doubting themselves, of course they doubted their daughter. From ‘You can’t!’ it was a step to ‘You mustn’t!’ I loved a man at eighteen as dearly as I ever loved anybody. He was a smart young man, with many excellent qualities. In those days he was considered so smart I doubted that I could be his wife. It sounds strange. But I did. I thought he needed a cleverer woman than myself to be that wife successfully. I told him so. It broke his heart. Then my father and mother died suddenly—within a year of each other. I had to make my way alone; earn my living. I went to Boston. Always I found myself a wallflower, a spectator, while others played and enjoyed. I wanted to play and enjoy also. But I’d been taught to believe that ‘nice girls’ didn’t do anything but sit and fold their hands. Then, praise God, a man came and took me up into an exceeding high mountain.”
“Captain Theddon?”
“No. Not Captain Theddon! He was a man from Virginia. He loved me dearly. For a year I was almost too happy to move. It seemed the world about me was made of frail glass—pink glass. If I moved it would crash. This man took me in hand, I say. In a year he undid most of my vicious training. He opened a new heaven and a new earth by getting me to accept exactly what I told you a moment ago—to be a participant in everything instead of a spectator. He taught me the simple truth that shyness is only the fear of ridicule—but that people who ridicule are either deficient themselves or coarsely conceited. Therefore they are not deserving of attention at all. And under his tutelage, for two short years I was deliriously happy!”
“Why didn’t you marry him, mother dear?”
“He had to go to California—because of tuberculosis. He died out there.”
The girl was shocked. Then she observed softly:
“I should have thought it would have broken you too, mother dear.”
“It would have broken me, Madelaine, if Hugh hadn’t taught me, along with the rest, to consider every experience that came to me as sent for some grand and constructive purpose. I think he knew he was going to die before he left me. Just a few moments before he boarded his train he said, ‘The greatest experience of your life, dear girl, lies just ahead. If you fail to apply it constructively, you’re not worthy of it at all.’ Poor me! I thought he meant our marriage if he recovered. He meant his own death—my loss of him. It came to me—his last message—after he was only a memory. It was hard to see anything constructive in that horrible disappointment. But I did. I plunged into life, making it give me something to outweigh my grief. I don’t mean I became frivolous—I simply refused to be morbid—for Hugh’s sake at first—then for the sake of Life itself. I saw that my loss had been sent to deepen my life, to make me sensitive to others who had suffered. I found out how richly one may live, whether it be in sunshine or in mist. And that philosophy now I want to pass along to you. To live, dear girl, just to live—for its own sweet sake—is a blessed, blessed privilege. But alas, so few know how to live. They go on the ‘I mustn’t’ policy, never stopping to reason out why. They merely exist—even in the simplest of life’s rôles. And I don’t want you to merely exist, Madelaine. I want you to get from beautiful Life every last fleck of sunshine and shadow. There’s no sorrow that can come to you, dear, that you can’t make beautiful. There’s no joy or happiness that you can’t make injurious and vicious. Never mind what your rôle in life is to be, dear, whether you become a great artist or the unsung wife of an unsung man, whatever your hands find to do, don’t only ‘do it with all your might’ but find some way to make it interesting. A sod hut on a prairie can be made as interesting as a gallery of Italian art—if you only look at it in the right light, making the utmost of yourself and materials. But to do that, you must be a part of those materials yourself—always a participant, sure of yourself, positive, constructive, analytical, intense, living each day to every one of the eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds it contains.”
Gracia Theddon not only preached this sort of thing; she lived it—every one of the day’s eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds—herself. Her home, her social life, her dress, her face,—she had paid a price for everything that she was and owned. And having paid the price, she saw that she had her “Value Received.”