Now, I don't feel that way.

I don't like to see such things; they distress me, and I don't forget them." Lois, reading Helen's letter, which was full of grief for the helpless trouble she saw in Lockhaven, thought that Mr.Forsythe had a very tender heart.

Helen was questioning the meaning of the suffering about her; already the problem as old as life itself confronted her, and she asked, Why?
Dr.Howe had noticed this tendency in some of her later letters, and scarcely knew whether to be annoyed or amused by it.

"Now what in the world," he said, as Lois handed back the letter,--"what in the world does the child mean by asking me if I don't think--stay, where is that sentence ?" The rector fumbled for his glasses, and, with his lower lip thrust out, and his gray eyebrows gathered into a frown, glanced up and down the pages.

"Ah, yes, here: 'Do you not think,' she says, 'that the presence in the world of suffering which cannot produce character, irresponsible suffering, so to speak, makes it hard to believe in the personal care of God ?' It's perfect nonsense for Helen to talk in that way! What does she know about 'character' and 'irresponsible suffering'?
I shall tell her to mend her husband's stockings, and not bother her little head with theological questions that are too big for her." "Yes, sir," Lois answered, carefully snipping off the thorns on the stem of a rose before she plunged it down into the water in the big punch-bowl; "but people cannot help just wondering sometimes." "Now, Lois, don't you begin to talk that way," the rector cried impatiently; "one in a family is enough!" "Well," said Dick Forsythe gayly, "what's the good of bothering about things you can't understand ?" "Exactly," the rector answered.