Selfish satisfaction is often found quite as much in mental attitudes of grief as in sensations of joy.
Finally this woman has recognized for herself the conceit in her contemplation of her faults, and that she has not only allowed them to be positive while her attitude against them is negative; she has actually nursed them and been positive herself with their positiveness.
Her attitude against them was therefore more than ordinarily negative.
The more common way of being negative while we allow our various forms of selfishness to positively govern us is, first in bewailing a weakness seriously, but constantly looking at it and weeping over it, and in that way suggesting it over and over to our brains so that we are really hypnotizing ourselves with the fault and enforcing its expression when we think we are in the effort to conquer it.

Such is our negative attitude.
Now if we are convinced that evil in ourselves has no power unless we give it power, that is the first step toward making our efforts positive and so negativing the evil.

If we are convinced that evil in ourselves has not only no power but no importance unless we give it power, that is a step still farther in advance.

The next step is to refuse to submit to it and refuse to resist it.

That means a positive yielding away from it and a positive attention to doing our work as well as we can do it, whatever that work may be.
There is one way in which people suffer intensely through being negative and allowing their temptations to be positive, and that is in the question of inherited evil.