rings, all are men
Condemned alike to groan,
The tender for another's pain,
The unfeeling for his own."

She still had a good deal of ill-health and ill-luck, and a good deal
of pleasure in spite of both. She was still happy in the happiness of
others, and pleased by their praise. But she was less headstrong and
opinionated in her plans, and less fretful when they failed. It is
possible, after one has cut one's wisdom-teeth, to cure one's self
even of a good deal of vanity, and to learn to play the second fiddle
very gracefully; and Madam Liberality did not resist the lessons of
life.

GOD teaches us wisdom in divers ways. Why He suffers some
people to have so many troubles and so little of what we call pleasure
in this world we cannot in this world know. The heaviest blows often
fall on the weakest shoulders, and how these endure and bear up under
them is another of the things which GOD knows better than we.

I will not pretend to decide whether grown-up people's troubles are
harder to bear than children's troubles, but they are of a graver
kind. It is very bitter when the boys melt the nose of one's dearest
doll against the stove, and living pets with kind eyes and friendly
paws grow aged and die; but the death of friends is a more serious and
lasting sorrow, if it is not more real.

Madam Liberality shed fewer tears after she grew up than she had done
before, but she had some heart-aches which did not heal.

The thing which did most to cure her of being too managing for the
good of other people was Darling's marriage. If ever Madam Liberality
had felt proud of self-sacrifice and success, it was about this. But
when Darling was fairly gone, and "Faithful"--very grey with dust and
years--kept watch over only one sister in "the girls' room," he might
have seen Madam Liberality's nightly tears if his eyes had been made
of anything more sensitive than yellow paint.

Desolate as she was, Madam Liberality would have hugged her grief if
she could have had her old consolation, and been happy in the
happiness of another. Darling never said she was not happy. It was
what she left out, not what she put into the long letters she sent
from India that cut Madam Liberality to the heart.

Darling's husband read all her letters, and he did not like the home
ones to be too tender--as if Darling's mother and sister pitied her.
And he read Darling's letters before they went away by the mail.

From this it came