“I have a mind to see,” she returned, laughing and throwing her head back, as she looked up at him out of the corner of her lustrous eyes.  “But I will pay you a better compliment.  I positively thank you for the rebuke.  I do many things like that, for which I am always sorry.  Oh! you don’t know how difficult it is to be a good princess.”  And she shook her head, with a gathering of little trouble-wrinkles in her forehead, as much as to say, “There is no getting away from it, though.”  Then she breathed a soft little sigh of tribulation as they walked on.

“I know it must be a task to be good when everybody flatters even one’s shortcomings,” said Brandon, and then continued in a way that, I am free to confess, was something priggish:  “It is almost impossible for us to see our own faults, even when others are kind enough to point them out, for they are right ugly things and unpleasant to look upon.  But lacking those outside monitors, one must all the more cultivate the habit of constant inlooking and self-examination.  If we are only brave enough to confront our faults and look them in the face, ugly as they are, we shall be sure to overcome the worst of them.  A striving toward good will achieve at least a part of it.”

“Oh!” returned the princess, “but what is good and what is wrong?  So often we can not tell them apart until we look back at what we have done, and then it is all too late.  I truly wish to be good more than I desire anything else in the world.  I am so ignorant and helpless, and have such strong inclinations to do wrong that sometimes I seem to be almost all wrong.  The priests say so much, but tell us so little.  They talk about St. Peter and St. Paul, and a host of other saints and holy fathers and what-nots, but fail to tell us what we need every moment of our lives; that is, how to know the right when we see it, and how to do it; and how to know the wrong and how to avoid it.  They ask us to believe so much, and insist that faith is the sum of virtue, and the lack of it the sum of sin; that to faith all things are added; but we might believe every syllable of their whole disturbing creed, and then spoil it all through blind ignorance of what is right and what is wrong.”

“As to knowing right and wrong,” replied Brandon, “I think I can give you a rule which, although it may not cover the whole ground, is excellent for every-day use.  It is this:  Whatever makes others unhappy is wrong; whatever makes the world happier is good.  As to how we are always to do this, I can not tell you.  One has to learn that by trying.  We can but try, and if we fail altogether, there is still virtue in every futile effort toward the right.”

Mary bent her head as she walked along in thought.

“What you have said is the only approach to a rule for knowing and doing the right I have ever heard.  Now what do you think of me as a flatterer?  But it will do no good; the bad is in me too strong; it always does itself before I can apply any rule, or even realize what is coming.”  And again she shook her head with a bewitching little look of trouble.