to what plebeian uses the garment might come after it should leave her
hands.

Mercy's deep blush when she replied to her mother's astonished inquiry,
how she could possibly earn any money, sprung from her consciousness of a
secret,--a secret so harmless in itself, that she was ashamed of having
any feeling of guilt in keeping it a secret; and yet, her fine and
fastidious honesty so hated even the semblance of concealment, that the
mere withholding of a fact, simply because she disliked to mention it,
seemed to her akin to a denial of it. If there is such a thing in a human
being as organic honesty,--an honesty which makes a lie not difficult, but
impossible, just as it is impossible for men to walk on ceilings like
flies, or to breathe in water like fishes,--Mercy Philbrick had it. The
least approach to an equivocation was abhorrent to her: not that she
reasoned about it, and submitting it to her conscience found it wicked,
and therefore hateful; but that she disliked it instinctively,--as
instinctively as she disliked pain. Her moral nerves shrank from it, just
as nerves of the body shrink from suffering; and she recoiled from the
suggestion of such a thing with the same involuntary quickness with which
we put up the hand to ward off a falling blow, or drop the eyelid to
protect an endangered eye. Physicians tell us that there are in men and
women such enormous differences in this matter of sensitiveness to
physical pain that one person may die of a pain which would be
comparatively slight to another; and this is a fact which has to be taken
very carefully into account, in all dealing with disease in people of the
greatest capacity for suffering. May there not be equally great
differences in souls, in the matter of sensitiveness to moral
hurt?--differences for which the soul is not responsible, any more than
the body is responsible for its skin's having been made thin or thick.
Will-power has nothing whatever to do with determining the latter