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That pale face, with its tint of old ivory, those thin, finely-cut lips, indicative of diabolical craft, could she but read aright, those unfathomable eyes, touched her fancy as it had never yet been touched, awoke within her that latent vein of romance, self-abnegation, supreme foolishness, which lurks in the nature of every woman, be she chaste as ice and pure as snow. The supper was long.
She did not think of the sweet, maternal duties, demanding patience and self-abnegation, of the long rockings when sleep would not come, of the laughing awakenings sparkling with fresh water. No! she saw in the child naught but the daily walk. It is such a pretty sight, the little bundle of finery, with floating ribbons and long feathers, that follows young mothers through the crowded streets.
Selfishness, fear of death, love of riches, and love of luxury, these were all unintelligible to the Kosekin, as much as to us would be self-abnegation, contempt of death, voluntary poverty, and asceticism. But as with us self-denying rulers may make others rich and be popular for this, so here among the Kosekin a selfish ruler might be popular by making others poor.
But although he stood lonely, shut out, and without hope before closed blinds, pretending in his distress that he could look through them, he was none the less happy. For in those days his heart lived. Warmly and sadly it beat for you, Ingeborg Holm, and his soul embraced your blond, bright, and saucily ordinary little personality in blissful self-abnegation.
Now and then they sent her tickets for church fairs. But it takes more love than most women have for each other to give the tact, the self-abnegation, that such unequal relations, to be permanent, require. The momentary gush of sympathy that the Bowdoin girls felt, upon their grandfather's account of Sadie's loneliness, was chilled at the first haughty word Mercedes gave them.
Mark does not record any accompanying words, and none were needed, The unconsciousness of rank, the spontaneous acceptance of inferiority, the absence of claims to consideration and respect, which naturally belong to childhood as it ought to be, and give it winningness and grace, are the marks of a true disciple, and are the more winning in such because they are not of nature, but regained by self-abnegation.
Certainly it had not come to represent the thing he was now teaching, that self-abnegation which he had but newly brought to light nay, hardly to the light yet only the twilight; and nothing less, it seems to me, can have suggested the terrible symbol!
Now and then a brave, with an amount of self-abnegation worthy of a better cause, would issue from the tent with his cheeks distended and his mouth full of the fire-water, and going along the ranks of his friends he would squirt a little of the liquor into the open mouths of his less fortunate brethren. But things did not always go so smoothly.
She hated the thought of self-abnegation, of bridling her eager tongue, of going only where her enlightened conscience said a Christian should go, of looking out for and calling after others to go with her. She wished deliberately to ignore it all. Not forever, she would have been shocked at the thought.
Only because it is its property to be always thus, does mankind so highly prize this activity. If men really were called to the service of others through artistic work, they would see in that work only obligation, and they would fulfil it with toil, with privations, and with self-abnegation.
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