On Sunday she went
to a formal, dignified, self-satisfied church; she attended a
Sunday-school where the teacher made the lesson interesting without
requiring much from the girls; she spent the afternoon with a book, the
piano, and the relatives and friends who came to call. Church, home,
friends, seemed content with her just as she was. She meant to do so
much and to some of her friends she told with great enthusiasm her plans
for future work. But the days passed as other days had passed. What
became of her passion to serve, to share in the work of making life
easier and happier? What became of the cry in her heart for something to
do to express the new life which had fired her soul? They died. Slowly
the fire was quenched by inaction, the embers grew cold, the longings
were quieted, life went on as before--so easy it is to _drift_.
She has the sympathy of every one of us, the girl who "_means to_," for
we also intend to do, and fail. Perhaps she learns from our vocabularies
the words and phrases which so often appear in her own. "Tomorrow," she
says, and "I am going to," "I intend" and "I mean some day to." She
enjoys the present but all that she hopes to _do_ she puts into the
future. She does not realize at first that the future always has a day
of reckoning and that suddenly when one least expects it, the future
meets her in the present and says, "How about this and this and this
which you were going to do? The time is past.
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