It is told of her also that when
one of her children asked for some water in summer, between meals, she
replied: "Mon enfant, vous ne serez jamais qu'un etre manque, une
pygmee, si vous prenez ces habitudes-la, pensez, mon petit coeur, au
fiel de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, et vous aurez le courage
d'attendre le diner." She had learned for herself the strength of
_going without_.
One more lesson must be mentioned, the hardest of all to be
learnt--perfect sincerity. It is so hard not to pose, for all but the
very truest and simplest natures--to pose as independent, being eaten
up with human respect; to pose as indifferent though aching with the
wish to be understood; to pose as flippant while longing to be in
earnest; to hide an attraction to higher things under a little air of
something like irreverence. It is strange that this kind of pose is
considered as less insincere than the opposite class, which is rather
out of fashion for this very reason, yet to be untrue to one's better
self is surely an unworthier insincerity than to be ashamed of the
worst. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the costliness of the
effort to overcome it, and the more observation and reflection we
spend on this point the more shall we be convinced that it is very
hard to learn to be quite true, and that it entails more personal
self-sacrifice than almost any other virtue.
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