But every child is sometimes infuriating; most children are not infrequently odious. ‘If only my husband were more considerate, less lazy, less extravagant’ . . . ‘If only my wife had fewer moods and more sense, and were less extravagant’ . . . ‘If my father wasn’t so infernally prosy and close-fisted.’ But in everyone, and of course in ourselves, there is that which requires forbearance, tolerance, forgiveness. The necessity of practising these virtues first sets us, forces us, upon the attempt to turn—more strictly, to let God turn—our love into Charity. These frets and rubs are beneficial.
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