“You never have the common honesty, Jack, in this most private journal (they say hardly anyone _has_) to put down the thought if it crosses your mind ‘Well, I think I am rather a fine fellow’ or its equivalent. Because it never comes? Oh, dear your precious ‘humility’! I wish Miss W. could look into you:—_do_ you? Not you, you humbug! ‘Well, but,’ (retorts S. J.-B. accused) ‘I _do_ work with a single purpose,—I _have_ tried very hard, and, am sure, succeeded somewhat in this hard battle of these months,—what is the good of pretending to call myself names? Did not Job ‘maintain his integrity’? You coward! You must skulk behind Job. Looks respectable, does it? Say honestly ‘I do try harder than some people do,’ for in truth I believe that is all your conceit does amount to. I know from my heart I do recognize and reverence holiness and purity as far above mine as Snowden to a mole-hill. And _is_ that conceit? I don’t believe it is. No,—‘Not guilty, S. J.-B.’ Plead boldly, and don’t give in for shamefacedness. And besides you have no right to deny His triumph ‘Who giveth us the victory,’—by fighting modest on the sham. You _have_ won some victories. Thank God quietly, and pressing on to the things before. ‘I press towards the mark.’ God knows—and _you_ know—there are enough to win. Oh, _how_ far away lies doing even what is our ‘duty to do.’ But I don’t know that the realest soundest life limits itself to calling itself ‘miserable sinner.’ Zacchaeus told Christ what he tried to do. He did not rebuke him as man does and say, ‘No, believe yourself utterly vile (for the glory of your Maker?)’ There,—go to bed, S. J.-B.” A few days later she recurs—as often—to the broken friendship: “... Well, I note markedly how, with all this light, all this growth,— respecting the suffering—(and I think all this would have brought a ‘right judgement’ too) I do not swerve one iota from my judgement of _facts_. I cannot conceive it one hairsbreadth more possible that any but a mental cloud can have worked in the way it has,—that under any possible circumstances my child, with her glorious nature and heart, can have acted as her image has....[26]