Sunday. Mrs. Lasette, looking bright and happy, came with her daughter,
and Mrs. Larkins entered arrayed in her best attire, looking starched
and prim, as if she had made it the great business of her life to take
care of her dignity and to think about herself. Mrs. Larkins,[5] though
for years a member of church, had not learned that it was unchristian to
be narrow and selfish. She was strict in her attendance at church and
gave freely to its support; but somehow with all her attention to the
forms of religion, one missed its warm and vivifying influence from her
life, and in the loving clasp of a helping hand, in the tender beam of a
sympathizing glance, weary-hearted mothers and wives never came to her
with their heartaches and confided to her their troubles. Little
children either shrank from her or grew quiet in her presence. What was
missing from her life was the magnetism of love. She had become so
absorbed in herself that she forgot everybody else and thought more of
her rights than her duties. The difference between Mrs. Lasette and Mrs.
Larkins was this, that in passing through life one scattered sunshine
and the other cast shadows over her path. Mrs. Lasette was a fine
conversationalist. She regarded speech as one of heaven's best gifts,
and thought that conversation should be made one of the finest arts, and
used to subserve the highest and best purposes of life, and always
regretted when it was permitted to degenerate into gossip and
backbiting. Harsh judgment she always tried to modify, often saying in
doubtful cases, "Had we not better suspend our judgments? Truly we do
not like people to think the worst of us and it is not fulfilling the
law of love to think the worst of them. Do you not know that if we wish
to dwell in his tabernacle we are not to entertain a reproach against
our neighbor, nor to back-bite with our lips and I do not think there is
a sin which more easily besets society than this." "Speech," she would
say, "is a gift so replete with rich and joyous possibilities," and she
always tried to raise the tone of conversation at home and abroad. Of