Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/94

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ABOUT PEOPLE.

consists largely in working for other people in their way, not ours. Too often we like to make them happy by the method that gives us the least trouble, and, if they will not rejoice, we turn upon them and call them ungrateful. When other success wanes that of usefulness still remains; attention to others' wants, and sympathy for them, create ability to aid, and practice brings tact and grace. Each year, day, and hour is the maker of opportunity to him who takes the horizon as his boundary line of helpful work.

For those to whom limitation has forbidden activity there is the usefulness of being, the passive side of character. The being ready not to do is the hardest lesson of life; not to do in household striving, in mother's cares and longings, in noble, personal ambitions, in sharing the great throes of the world which ultimate in victories of social progress, in shaping anew the warped intellectual life, which degenerates into affectation of literary values; and

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