This troubled me; yet I should have quickly forgotten it.  I met the same story in several other directions within a few days; and now it troubled me more.  Women are suspicious creatures.  I don’t like to confess it, but it is true.  Besides, servants do sometimes steal.  And little foreign blood of the oppressed nationalities has truth in it, or honesty.  Why should it?  Why should the subjugated Irish, any more than the Southern slaves, beaten down for centuries by brutal strength, seeking to exterminate their religion and their speech, to terrify them out of intelligence and independence, to crush them into permanent poverty and ignorance,—­why should they tell the truth or respect property?  Falsehood and theft are that cunning which is the natural and necessary weapon of weakness.  Their falsehood is their resistance, in the only form that weakness can use, evasion instead of force.  Their theft is the taking of what is instinctively felt to be due; their gratification of an instinct after justice; done secretly because they have not the strength to demand openly.  Such things are unnecessary in America, no doubt.  But habits survive emigration.  They are to be deplored, charitably and hopefully and tenderly cured as diseases, not attacked and furiously struck and thrust at as wild beasts.  Thus it might be with Bridget, notwithstanding her great, clear, innocent eyes, and open, honest ways.  If she had grown up to think such doings harmless, she would have no conscience about it.  Conscience is very pliant to education.  It troubles no man for what he is trained to do.

So I felt these stories.  I could not find it in my heart to talk to poor Bridget about it.  I could not tell her large-hearted old mother.  This reluctance was entirely involuntary, an instinct.  I wish I had felt it more clearly and obeyed it altogether!  There is some fatal cloud of human circumstance that covers up from our sight our just instinctive perceptions,—­makes us drive them out before the mechanical conclusions of mere reason; and when our reason, our special human pride, has failed us, we say in our sorrow, I see now; if I had only trusted my first impulse!—­What is this cloud?  Is it original sin?  I asked my husband.  He was writing his sermon.  He stopped and told me with serious interest,—­“This cloud is that original or inbred sin which we receive from Adam; obscuring and vitiating the free exercise of the originally perfect faculties; wilting them down, as it were, from a high native assimilation to the operative methods of the Divine Mind, to the painful, creeping, mechanical procedures of the comparing and judging reason.  And this lost power is to be restored, we may expect, by the regenerating force of conversion.”

I know I’ve got this right; because, after Henry had thanked me for my question, he said I was a good preaching-stock,—­that the inquiry “joggled up” his mind, and suggested just what fayed in with his sermon; and afterwards I heard him preach it; and now I have copied it out of his manuscript, and have it all correct and satisfactory.  What will he do to me, if he should see this in print?  But I can’t help it.  And what is more, I don’t believe his theological stuff.  If it were true, there would not so many good people be such geese.