Page:On the Hill-top (1919).pdf/43

 could. I don't see why they want to talk that way. Why, I've had some things just as bad as those and I don't talk about them.'

Nor I. Why, one time I had——' and then she went to work and told me in careful detail a great long story about what she had been through with and how it felt, and all the rest of it; —and when she got through, she said:—'But I never talk about those things;' and I honestly believe that she thought that she didn't; but if she had turned the spot-light back into the cubby-holes of her thought for a minute, she would have found——."

"You remember," said the Dream, "what we decided that spot-lights are for."

"Yes," said Marjorie, "They are to use upon ourselves;—but it is such a lot easier to turn them in other directions. So of course I don't have to bother about what she would have found with her spot-light; but just the same, I got a lesson."

"That's all right," said the Dream, "Get as many as you please. I suppose you know how you happen to recognize a lesson that comes through some other person's mistake?"

Marjorie thought for a minute, then she laughed. "Because I notice that if I turn the spot-light my way, I find that I have some of the very same sort of ornaments that caused the lesson, sitting around on the mantle-piece or in the coal-hole or up in the attic or somewhere like that. I always know that it is a lesson and that part of it is coming to me, when I find that I