“I cannot think, Amy, how you can go on so patiently with what is so tiresome, with no variety in it, and a kind of work which will not look striking when all is done,” exclaimed Dora one day, as she unrolled some glittering gold thread from her reel.
Amy smiled as she glanced up at her sister’s far more amusing occupation. “If I could have worked anything so pretty as the veil which you are making, I daresay that I should have liked it much better,” she observed. “But I am pleased to do the plain work as well as I can, as the embroidery would have been far too difficult for me.”
Amy’s curtains might seem plain to the eyes of most people, but her mother looked upon them with special pleasure; for, as she said to herself, “they are embroided all over with faith and love.”
Agnes also made steady progress with her not very inviting work, though she took in it no great pleasure. Agnes regarded the sewing as a matter of duty, and therefore plied her needle in the same spirit as that in which she struggled to subdue her temper, and tried to put a bridle on her tongue. It was the work which had been given to her, and she would do it, without asking herself whether she liked it or not.
“This material, neither smooth nor pretty, is something like a type of me,” thought Agnes, as she put the finishing stitch into one of her mohair curtains; “but the goats’-hair had just as much its appointed place in the Tabernacle as loops of silver and sockets of gold. I shall never be as much liked and admired as Dora is—I may as well make up my mind to that; but if God help me by His grace, I too may lead a useful life, and be dear—at least to my mother.”
And more and more dear was Agnes becoming to her mother, who watched with the keen eye of affection the struggle made by her eldest daughter against her besetting sins. Mrs. Temple guessed what it cost Agnes to bear a rough joke in silence, to lend pretty things which she feared that the borrower might spoil, to give up her own way, and to show no jealous anger when another was preferred before her.
“My girl’s character is becoming stronger and nobler every day,” thought Mrs. Temple; “I thank the Lord for my Agnes, for I am sure that it is His grace that is working in her heart. Agnes promises to grow up into a really valuable woman, one whom her mother can trust.”