This one little pleasure kept Gretchen not only alive, but comparatively glad.  Her body suffered for want of sun and air.  There was no helping that, by any amount of spiritual compensation, so long as she must stand, year in and year out, in a close, dark corner, and do hard drudgery.  But, if she had stood in that close, dark corner, doing that hard drudgery, and had had no pleasure to comfort her, she would have been dead in three months.

If all men and women could realize the power, the might of even a small pleasure, how much happier the world would be! and how much longer bodies and souls both would bear up under living!  Sensitive people realize it to the very core of their being.  They know that often and often it happens to them to be revived, kindled, strengthened, to a degree which they could not describe, and which they hardly comprehend, by some little thing,—­some word of praise, some token of remembrance, some proof of affection or recognition.  They know, too, that strength goes out of them, just as inexplicably, just as fatally, when for a space, perhaps even a short space, all these are wanting.

People who are not sensitive also come to find this out, if they are tender.  They are by no means inseparable,—­tenderness and sensitiveness; if they were, human nature would be both more comfortable and more agreeable.  But tender people alone can be just to sensitive ones; living in close relations with them, they learn what they need, and, so far as they can, supply it, even when they wonder a little, and perhaps grow a little weary.

We see a tender and just mother sometimes sighing because one over-sensitive child must be so much more gently restrained or admonished than the rest.  But she has her reward for every effort to adjust her methods to the instrument she does not quite understand.  If she doubts this, she has only to look on the right hand and the left, and see the effect of careless, brutal dealing with finely strung, sensitive natures.

We see, also, many men,—­good, generous, kindly, but not sensitive-souled,—­who have learned that the sunshine of their homes all depends on little things, which it would never have entered into their busy and composed hearts to think of doing, or saying, or providing, if they had not discovered that without them their wives droop, and with them they keep well.

People who are neither tender nor sensitive can neither comprehend nor meet these needs.  Alas! that there are so many such people; or that, if there must be just so many, as I suppose there must, they are not distinguishable at first sight, by some mark of color, or shape, or sound, so that one might avoid them, or at least know what to expect in entering into relation with them.  Woe be to any sensitive soul whose life must, in spite of itself, take tone and tint from daily and intimate intercourse with such!  No bravery, no philosophy, no patience can save it from a slow death.  But, while the subtlest and most stimulating pleasures which the soul knows come to it through its affections, and are, therefore, so to speak, at every man’s mercy, there is still left a world of possibility of enjoyment, to which we can help ourselves, and which no man can hinder.