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 conditions.  Let us be careful how far we take it to task for failing to control the others.  Perhaps we shall learn, in some other stage of existence, that there is in this world a great deal of moral color blindness, congenital, incurable; and that God has much more pity than we suppose for poor things who have stumbled a good many times while they were groping in darkness.

People who see clearly themselves are almost always intolerant of those who do not.  We often see this ludicrously exemplified, even in the trivial matter of near-sightedness.  We are almost always a little vexed, when we point out a distant object to a friend, and hear him reply,—­

“No, I do not see it at all.  I am near-sighted.”

“What! can’t you see that far?” is the frequent retort, and in the pity is a dash of impatience.

There is a great deal of intolerance in the world, which is closely akin to this; and not a whit more reasonable or righteous, though it makes great pretensions to being both.  Mercy Philbrick was full of such intolerance, on this one point of honesty.  She was intolerant not only to others, she was intolerant to herself.  She had seasons of fierce and hopeless debating with herself, on the most trivial matters, or what would seem so to nine hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand.  During such seasons as these, her treatment of her friends and acquaintances had odd alternations of frank friendliness and reticent coolness.  A sudden misgiving whether she might not be appearing to like her friend more than she really did would seize her at most inopportune moments, and make her absent-minded and irresponsive.  She would leave sentences abruptly unfinished,—­invitations, perhaps, or the acceptances of invitations, the mere words of which spring readily to one’s lips, and are thoughtlessly spoken.  But, in Mercy’s times of conflict with herself, even these were exaggerated in her view to monstrous deceits.  She had again and again held long conversations with Mr. Allen on this subject, but he failed to help her.  He was a good man, of average conscientiousness and average perception:  he literally could not see many of the points which Mercy’s keener analysis ferreted out, and sharpened into weapons for her own pain.  He thought her simply morbid.