Perhaps they were rough; it might be that of the great things of which Mariquita herself thought so habitually, they thought little and seldom: but she did not think them bad. She thought more of them than they guessed, and liked them better than they imagined. She would have wished to serve and help them, and was not indolent, but humble concerning herself, and shy. She worked for them, more perhaps than her father thought necessary; in that way she could serve them. But she could not preach to them, nor exhort them. She would have shrunk instinctively, not from the danger of ridicule, but from the danger that the ridicule might fall on religion itself, and not merely on her. She would have dreaded the risk of misrepresenting religion to them, of giving them ideas of God such as would repel them from Him. She knew that speech was not easy to her, eloquent speech was no gift of hers; she did not believe herself to have any readiness of expressing what she felt and knew, and did not credit herself with great knowledge. She did not really put them down as being entirely ignorant of what she did know. The idea of a woman's preaching would have shocked Mariquita, to her it would have seemed "out of place." She was a humble girl, with a diffidence not universal among those who are themselves trying to serve God, some of whom are apt to be slow at understanding that others may be as near Him as themselves, though behaving differently, and holding a different fashion of speech. God who had made them must know more about them, she felt, than she could. She did not think she understood them very well, but God had made the men and knew them as well as He knew the women. She was, with all her ignorance and her limited opportunities of observation and understanding, able to see much goodness among these neighbors of hers; He must be able to see much more.