They know, too, that strength goes out of them,
just as inexplicably, just as fatally, when for a space, perhaps even a
short space, all these are wanting.
People who are not sensitive also come to find this out, if they are
tender. They are by no means inseparable,--tenderness and sensitiveness;
if they were, human nature would be both more comfortable and more
agreeable. But tender people alone can be just to sensitive ones; living
in close relations with them, they learn what they need, and, so far as
they can, supply it, even when they wonder a little, and perhaps grow a
little weary.
We see a tender and just mother sometimes sighing because one
over-sensitive child must be so much more gently restrained or admonished
than the rest. But she has her reward for every effort to adjust her
methods to the instrument she does not quite understand. If she doubts
this, she has only to look on the right hand and the left, and see the
effect of careless, brutal dealing with finely strung, sensitive natures.
We see, also, many men,--good, generous, kindly, but not
sensitive-souled,--who have learned that the sunshine of their homes all
depends on little things, which it would never have entered into their
busy and composed hearts to think of doing, or saying, or providing, if
they had not discovered that without them their wives droop, and with them
they keep well.
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