"Why to _me_? You would be doing more good than by going to hear all that music." I gazed at her for one moment; a suspicion (which, had it been a certainty, would have failed to turn me from her) thwarted my simple pity. I gazed, and it was enough; I felt there was nothing I needed fear to know,--that child had never sinned against her soul. I therefore said, more carelessly than just then I felt: "Miss Lemark, because you are gifted, because you are good, because you are innocent. It is not everybody who is either of these, and very few indeed are all the three. I will not have you talk just now, unless, indeed, you can tell me that I can do nothing for you. You know how slight my resources are, but you need not fear to trust me." "If you did let me talk, what should I say? But you have told a lie,--or rather, I made you tell it. I am _not_ gifted,--at least, my gifts are such as nobody really cares for. I am innocent? I am _not_ innocent; and for the other word you used, I do not think I ought to speak it,--it no more belongs to me than beauty or than happiness." "All that is beautiful belongs to all who love it, thank God, Miss Lemark, or I should be very poor indeed in that respect. But why are you so angry with yourself because, having gone through too much happiness, you are no longer happy? It must be so for all of us, and I do not regret, though I have felt it." "_You_ regret it,--you to regret anything!" said Laura, haughtily, her hauteur striking through her paleness reproachfully. "You--a man! I would sell my soul, if I have a soul, to be a man, to be able to live to myself, to be delivered from the torment of being and feeling what nobody cares for." "If we live to ourselves, we men,--if I may call myself a man,--we are not less tormented, and not less because men are expected to bear up, and may not give themselves relief in softer sorrow. My dear Miss Lemark, it appears to me that if we allow ourselves to sink, either for grief or joy, it matters not which, we are very much to blame, and more to be pitied. There is ever a hope, even for the hopeless, as they think themselves; how much more for those who need not and must not despair! And those who are born with the most hopeful temper find that they cannot exist without faith." "That is the way the people always talk who have everything the world can give them,--who have more than everything they wish for; who have all their love cared for; who may express it without being mocked, and worship without being trampled on. You are the most enviable person in the whole world except one, and I do not envy her, but I do envy you."