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“Tell Tom I am very much obliged to him.”

But what they did tell Tom was that the quinsy had broken, on which he gave three cheers more.

PART II.

Madam Liberality grew up into much the same sort of person that she was when a child. She always had been what is termed old-fashioned, and the older she grew the better her old-fashionedness became her, so that at last her friends would say to her, “Ah, if we all wore as well as you do, my dear! You’ve hardly changed at all since we remember you in short petticoats.” So far as she did change the change was for the better. (It is to be hoped we do improve a little as we get older!) She was still liberal and economical. She still planned and hoped indefatigably. She was still tender-hearted in the sense in which Gray speaks,

“To each his sufferings, all are men
Condemned alike to groan,
The tender for another’s pain,
The unfeeling for his own.”

She still had a good deal of ill-health and ill-luck, and a good deal of pleasure in spite of both. She was still happy in the happiness of others, and pleased by their praise. But she was less headstrong and opinionated in her plans, and less fretful when they failed. It is possible, after one has cut one’s wisdom-teeth, to cure one’s self even of a good deal of vanity, and to learn to play the second fiddle very gracefully; and Madam Liberality did not resist the lessons of life.

GOD teaches us wisdom in divers ways. Why He suffers some people to have so many troubles and so little of what we call pleasure in this world we cannot in this world know. The heaviest blows often fall on the weakest shoulders, and how these endure and bear up under them is another of the things which GOD knows better than we.

I will not pretend to decide whether grown-up people’s troubles are harder to bear than children’s troubles, but they are of a graver kind. It is very bitter when the boys melt the nose of one’s dearest doll against the stove, and living pets with kind eyes and friendly paws grow aged and die; but the death of friends is a more serious and lasting sorrow, if it is not more real.

Madam Liberality shed fewer tears after she grew up than she had done before, but she had some heart-aches which did not heal.

The thing which did most to cure her of being too managing for the good of other people was Darling’s marriage. If ever Madam Liberality had felt proud of self-sacrifice and success, it was about this. But when Darling was fairly gone, and “Faithful”–very grey with dust and years–kept watch over only one sister in “the girls’ room,” he might have seen Madam Liberality’s nightly tears if his eyes had been made of anything more sensitive than yellow paint.

Desolate as she was, Madam Liberality would have hugged her grief if she could have had her old consolation, and been happy in the happiness of another. Darling never said she was not happy. It was what she left out, not what she put into the long letters she sent from India that cut Madam Liberality to the heart.

Darling’s husband read all her letters, and he did not like the home ones to be too tender–as if Darling’s mother and sister pitied her. And he read Darling’s letters before they went away by the mail.

From this it came about that the sisters’ letters were very commonplace on the surface. And though Madam Liberality cried when Darling wrote, “Have swallows built in the summer-house this year? Have you put my old doll’s chest of drawers back in its place since the room was papered? What colour is the paper?”–the Major only said that stuff like that was hardly worth the postage to England. And when Madam Liberality wrote, “The clump of daffodils in your old bed was enormous this spring. I have not touched it since you left. I made Mother’s birthday wreath out of the flowers in your bed and mine. Jemima broke the slop-basin of the green and white tea-set to-day. It was the last piece left. I am trying to forgive her,”–the Major made no harsher remark than, “A storm in a slop-basin! Your sister is not a brilliant letter-writer, certainly.”