er woman.
She spoke of the things she planned to do, the career of social service
she had laid out for herself, and of the influence for good she would be
in the world--all of this to take place in the golden sometime when she
would be grown up and out of school.

Miss Amesbury heard her through with a quiet smile. Agony looked up,
encountered her gaze and stopped speaking. "Don't you think I can?" she
asked quickly.

"It is possible," replied Miss Amesbury tranquilly. "Everything is
possible. 'We are all architects of fate;' you must have heard that line
quoted before. Everyone carries his future in his own hands; fate has
really nothing to do with it. Whatever kind of bud we are, such a flower
we will be. We cannot make ourselves; all we can do is blossom. This
Other Person that you see in your golden dreams is after all only you,
changed from the You that you are now into the You that you hope to be.
If we are little, stunted buds we cannot be big, glorious blossoms. The
Future is only a great many Nows added up. It is the things you are
doing now that will make your future glorious or abject. To be a noble
woman you must have been a noble girl. You are setting your face now in
the direction in which you are going to travel. Every worthy action you
perform now will open the way for more worthy actions in the future, and
the same is true of unworthy ones."

Agony sat very still.

"It is the thing we stand for ourselves that makes us an influence for
evil or good," continued Miss Amesbury, "not the thing that we preach.
That is why so much of the so-called 'uplift work' in the world has no
effect upon the persons we are trying to uplift--we try to give them
something which we do not possess ourselves. We cannot give something
which we don't possess, don't ever forget that, dear child. Be sure that
your own torch is burning brightly before you attempt to light someone
else's with it.

"You know, Agony, that after Jesus went away out of the Temple at the
age of twelve years we do not hear of him again until he was a grown man
of thirty. What took place in those years we will never know exactly;
but in those Silent Years He prepared Himself for His glorious destiny.
He must have conquered Self, day by day, until He was master over all
his moods and desires, to be able to influence others so profoundly. He
must have developed a sympathetic understanding of His friends and
playfellows, to know so intimately the troubl