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Page 39
"No near ones, and none that she has ever seen. Still, she is not
absolutely alone, as many girls would be under like circumstances. We
would be only too glad to have her here; the Howards have telegraphed
asking her to spend the winter with them in Cambridge; I am confident
Dr. Winship will do the same when the news of Mrs. Oliver's death
reaches Europe; and Mrs. Bird seems to have constituted herself a sort
of fairy Godmother in chief. You see everybody loves Polly; and she
will probably have no less than four homes open to her. The fact is,
if you should put Polly on a desert island, the bees and the
butterflies and the birds would gather about her; she draws everything
and everybody to her magically. Then, too, she is not penniless.
Rents are low, and she cannot hope to get quite as much for the house
as before, but even counting repairs, taxes, and furnishings, we think
she is reasonably certain of fifty dollars a month."
"She will never be idle, unless this sorrow makes a great change in
her. Polly seems to have been created to 'become' by 'doing.'"
"Yet she does not in the least relish work, Edgar. I never knew a girl
with a greater appetite for luxury. One cannot always see the deepest
reasons in God's providence as applied to one's own life and character;
but it is often easy to understand them as one looks at other people
and notes their growth and development. For instance, Polly's intense
love for her invalid mother has kept her from being selfish. The
straitened circumstances in which she has been compelled to live have
prevented her from yielding to self-indulgence or frivolity. Even her
hunger for the beautiful has been a discipline; for since beautiful
things were never given to her ready-made, she has been forced to
create them. Her lot in life, which she has always lamented, has given
her a self-control, a courage, a power, which she never would have had
in the world had she grown up in luxury. She is too young to see it,
but it is very clear to me that Polly Oliver is a glorious product of
circumstances."
"But," objected Edgar, "that is not fair. You are giving all the
credit to circumstances, and none to Polly's own nature."
"Not at all. If there had not been the native force to develop,
experience would have had nothing to work upon. As it is, her lovely
childish possibilities have become probabilities, and I look to see the
girlish probabilities blossom into womanly certainties."
Meanwhile Polly, it must be confessed, was not at the present time
quite justifying the good opinion of her friends.
She had few of the passive virtues. She could bear sharp stabs of
misfortune, which fired her energy and pride, but she resented pin
pricks. She could carry heavy, splendid burdens cheerfully, but she
fretted under humble cares. She could serve by daring, but not by
waiting. She would have gone to the stake or the scaffold, I think,
with tolerable grace; but she would probably have recanted any article
of faith if she had been confronted with life-imprisonment.
Trouble that she took upon herself for the sake of others, and out of
love, she accepted sweetly. Sorrows that she did not choose, which
were laid upon her without her consent, and which were "just the ones
she did _not_ want, and did _not_ need, and would _not_ have, and could
_not_ bear,"--these sorrows found her unwilling, bitter, and impatient.
Yet if life is a school and we all have lessons to learn in it, the
Great Teacher will be unlikely to set us tasks which we have already
finished. Some review there must be, for certain things are specially
hard to keep in mind, and have to be gone over and over, lest they fade
into forgetfulness. But there must be continued progress in a life
school. There is no parrot repetition, sing-song, meaningless, of
words that have ceased to be vital. New lessons are to be learned as
fast as the old ones are understood. Of what use to set Polly tasks to
develop her bravery, when she was already brave?
Courage was one of the little jewels set in her fairy crown when she
was born, but there was a round, empty space beside it, where Patience
should have been. Further along was Daring, making a brilliant show,
but again there was a tiny vacancy waiting for Prudence.
The crown made a fine appearance, on the whole, because the large
jewels were mostly in place, and the light of these blinded you to the
lack of the others; but to the eye of the keen observer there was a
want of symmetry and completeness.
Polly knew the unfinished state of her fairy crown as well as anybody
else. She could not plead ignorance as an excuse; but though she would
have gone on polishing the great gems with a fiery zeal, she added the
little jewels very slowly, and that only on compulsion.
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