Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/245

Rh. I’m sure the passive part is always the dull one: life has been a great deal more thrilling since we found out that we revolved about the sun, instead of sitting still and fancying that all the planets were dancing attendance on us. After all, they were not; and it’s rather humiliating to think how the morning stars must have laughed together about it!”

There was no self-complacency in Justine’s eagerness to help. It was far easier for her to express it in action than in counsel, to grope for the path with her friend than to point the way to it; and when she had to speak she took refuge in ﬁgures to escape the pedantry of appearing to advise. But it was not only to Mrs. Dressel that her parables were dark, and the blank look in Bessy’s eyes soon snatched her down from the height of metaphor.

“I mean," she continued with a smile, “that, as human nature is constituted, it has got to ﬁnd its real self—the self to be interested in—outside of what we conventionally call ‘self’: the particular Justine or Bessy who is clamouring for her particular morsel of life. You see, self isn’t a thing one can keep in a box—bits of it keep escaping, and ﬂying off to lodge in all sorts of unexpected crannies; we come across scraps of ourselves in the most unlikely places—as I believe you would in Westmore, if you’d only go back there and look for them!” [ 229 ]