Part 44

“Yes,” said Florence, “I am always sorry and angry at myself when the other person keeps cool or is hurt. But when the other person gets angry, too, I feel as if I were right.”

“It’s an ugly thing to be angry,” I said; “it makes us so small, shuts us in.”

“How do you mean?” asked Marian.

“It cuts us off from that other person, makes it impossible to understand at least him, and so keeps us from completeness and harmony, actually robs us of part of ourself.”

Was it all the children’s fault, they asked, when children and parents failed to understand each other?

“As it takes two to make a quarrel,” I answered, “so it takes two to make a misunderstanding. But one can stop it. Remember that older people have often gone through trials in life that have shaken their nerves and made them sensitive and irritable to little annoyances.”

Marian asked: “Do you mean fussy?”

“Yes,” I said, “and it is easy to understand. But the fact that in many families some of the children get along well with the parents, and others do not, proves that at least some of the responsibility rests with the children.”

We spoke of self-control, of standing, as it were, outside and above ourselves—the idea of aloofness—and not working like a machine for the impulse of the moment. I said I had known people who had this trouble in youth, and stopped it with a strong resolution, because they saw it was a bad, an ugly and a controllable thing. Henry spoke of the old plan of counting a hundred before saying anything. We none of us liked the idea, possibly because we were tired of it; I said, for one, that I did not see how counting a hundred could make me change my mind, whereas thinking might. I said the best plan was to put one’s self at once, as it were, inside the other person, and then one could not possibly say the disagreeable thing. Henry, it seems, has only one difficulty, that of wanting to express or keep his own opinion at the expense of contradicting his elders. I said one had always the right to express one’s opinion, but one might also do it as an opinion, say “I think,” or “I believe”; that one might always consider how the thing said would impress the person listening. Marian spoke of people who irritate you by their presence, whom you dislike and who grate on you, no matter what they may do or say. Then I told them of the saving sense of humor; how, if we resolve to be amused by people in a pleasant, genial way, to see the humor in human life, we may avoid being hurt by them or hurting them in return.

Virginia especially agreed with me, cited incidents of being amused by the disagreeable, and spoke of Dickens as one who could be amused by all sorts of people, even the most “bromidic” or disagreeable. Marian said Dickens was amused by every one but his heroes and heroines. They almost always seemed a hardship to him and to others.

I said we must use every one for our good. That word to “use people” had been employed in a bad sense, but I meant it in a good sense.

“Whenever you are with any one you don’t like, think at once what you can get out of that meeting. Every human being has something for you, and you for him. Self always wants to find self.”

Marian and Ruth immediately thought of people from whom they could get nothing. Virginia, who does get something from everything, remarked that some people seemed to have very little self.

“To be a human being at all,” I answered, “how much of self one must have, compared with the animals!”

“I suppose,” said she; “that is why some people, who have not much, remind me of animals.”

I said I was sorry we had digressed so far, and feared we had not arrived anywhere, after all. Florence said she liked to confess her sins. And Marian answered her that it was a bad habit.

“It is all,” said Marian, “what I have heard before, and know to be true, and don’t do, anyway.”

“Nothing new?” I asked. “Not even the plan of trying to feel at once just what the other person is feeling?”

“Oh, yes, that, perhaps,” she said.

Marian seemed to think I had given her a great many dreadful “slams”; but I could not see it so. “I am sure I did not,” I said. “Oh, no,” she answered quite sarcastically, “not at all.” But she seemed to bear me no ill-will. Virginia said I wanted them to be good and virtuous. No, I said, I had not thought of that.

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “good but not virtuous, or virtuous but not good?”

I answered: “All I want you to do is to satisfy yourselves.”

“Is that all!” exclaimed Marian. “After you told us how we could never be wholly satisfied, how we should always want something more!”

“The beautiful life must be harmonious,” I said. “Disjointed beauty is not beautiful. You remember, we spoke of the city, how a beautiful house might be made to look not at all beautiful by being placed next to a high wall, or in any position where it did not fit; how the city could not be beautiful until all the people combined to build a harmonious city.”

“By itself the house would be beautiful, anyway,” they said.

“Yes,” I answered, “but in ugly surroundings its beauty would be half lost.”

Virginia said: “If I saw a very beautiful little girl between two ugly monkeys, I think the little girl would look all the more beautiful.”

Marian answered: “I would immediately imagine her petting or fondling the two monkeys, and then it would look beautiful.”