Previous to this, it had been no unusual
thing to see Wynnie and Dora impatient with each other; for Dora was
none the less a wild, somewhat lawless child, that she was a profoundly
affectionate one. She rather resembled her cousin Judy, in fact--whom
she called Aunt Judy, and with whom she was naturally a great favourite.
Wynnie, on the other hand, was sedate, and rather severe--more severe, I
must in justice say, with herself than with anyone else. I had sometimes
wished, it is true, that her mother, in regard to the younger children,
were more like her; but there I was wrong. For one of the great goods that
come of having two parents, is that the one balances and rectifies the
motions of the other. No one is good but God. No one holds the truth, or
can hold it, in one and the same thought, but God. Our human life is often,
at best, but an oscillation between the extremes which together make the
truth; and it is not a bad thing in a family, that the pendulums of father
and mother should differ in movement so far, that when the one is at one
extremity of the swing, the other should be at the other, so that they meet
only in the point of _indifference_, in the middle; that the predominant
tendency of the one should not be the predominant tendency of the other.
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