The Education of Catholic Girls. Janet Erskine Stuart

Unction, asked for her knitting, for the poor. "Mais Madame la Marquise a ete administree, elle va mourir!" said the maid, who thought the occupation of dying sufficient for a lady of her age. "Ma chere, ce n'est pas une raison pour perdre son temps," answered the indomitable Marquise. 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.