Life was not all spent on the mountain heights, of course. Even at this time she had her ups and downs like other people. Here is one of the “downs”:
“Who is sufficient for these things? seems my whole cry today. I don’t know why especially, but I seem so oppressed with a sense of the greatness, the weight of my work,—and of my own miserable insufficiency for it. Oh, so weak and stupid and unfit! And it isn’t humility,—it’s just truth.
I’m horribly showy,—always (voluntarily or not) deceiving people into a belief into talents I haven’t. Then I’ve will enough and would work, but no health or strength for it. That’s not your doing, S. J-B. ‘Hath not the Potter—?’
Besides, you’ll never be called upon to do what you can’t. God will give you power or send another in your stead.... And ‘who is sufficient?’ ‘My Grace is sufficient’.
Yet I am thankful, too, for even this fit of despair or at least downheartedness,—for I was fearing horribly, lest, my whole heart being bent on one hope and plan, I might be too far identifying _my_ success with _it_, lest I might be seeking to win something for myself,—not simply to see God’s will done by me or without me. And from the bottom of my heart did go up, ‘Lord, put me aside utterly if need be!—and here, perhaps, the answer.’”
She did not always take her reactions so seriously:
“Cold. Therefore rather cross and grumbling. Prowling about the corridors with shoulders nearly up to my ears, mind do. And I fool and sybarite enough to conjure up pictures of a certain dainty little room with blazing fire.... ‘Shame on ye, Gallants, wha ride not readily!’... Well, well, indeed it was not really a grumble,—only a John Bull growl. You don’t think I really give in an inch for such nonsense?
As well to grumble to my book as to poor small folk downstairs, who want bracing not enervating.
Oh, now you’re infringing the liberty of the press! I may write anything that wells up.
This is one of the many dialogues between “The Infantine” and “The Estimable,” as she called them. Greatly did her Mother appreciate the titles.
A few weeks later, after some words of yearning for a “comprehending ear,” a “sympathetic hand,” she breaks off abruptly with,—“Heigh ho! Shut up Grumbles! ‘a cussin’ and a swearin’ like that,’ as long coz would say.”