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With the cruel selfishness of a spendthrift miser, he had sold his young, fresh, beautiful daughter for dead, shining metal, to a man of sixty years, fit to be her grandfather, and who persecuted the innocent girl with the ardent passion of a stripling. She had been dragged to the altar, and the priest had been deaf to the "No!" she had uttered, when falling unconscious at his feet.
And he picked up a fresh pipe from the rack on the table and moistened the clay with his fat tongue. We sat in silence for a while. That this Sir George Covert should call the patroon a poltroon hurt me, for he was kin to us both; yet it seemed that there might be truth in the insolent fling, for selfishness and poltroonery are too often linked.
"And you," he said, savagely, "you sit by the road-side, with help in your hands, and Christ in your heart, and call your life lost, quarrel with your God, because that mass of selfishness has left you, because you are balked in your puny hope! Look at these women. What is their loss, do you think?
Self seems to be the mainspring of most lives; is it so in our own? When we come to look back at the last, we shall find no pleasure in viewing our own selfishness or its fruits. We shall not desire to retain it in our memories. We shall see that whatever was done through selfish motives was time and energy lost.
All that England cared for us was that we should be a market for her manufactures. This same selfishness has been the keynote of her policy down to the present day, except as the force of circumstances has modified it. Steadily pursued, it has contributed largely to make England the monetary and industrial master of the world. With this outline I pass to her present condition and outlook.
All the selfishness which practically monopolized his entire nature displayed itself in his terror. He cared nothing for others. He believed that Retief was at war with him alone. He believed that the raider sought only his wealth his wealth which his years of hard work and unscrupulous methods had laboriously piled up the wealth he loved and lived for the wealth which was to him as a god.
The history of the Church is a history of endeavor to keep it from drifting into the thing it professes not to be concrete selfishness. The Church began in humility and simplicity, and when it became successful, behold it became a thing of pomp, pride, processional, crowns, jewels, rich robes and a power that used itself to subjugate and subdue, instead of to uplift and lead by love and pity.
The brutal selfishness of love and of youth swept from his memory Strong's broken life and Drexley's despair. "Nothing," he cried, "so long as you will care for me. I am not your judge. I want you you, Emily, and your love. To-night I care for nothing else." She laid her soft fingers upon his eager face, half caressingly, half in repulse. "I never wished them harm," she said.
Not only will you have constantly to analyse the motives of your children, but you will have to analyse your own motives to discriminate between those internal suggestions springing from a true parental solicitude and those which spring from your own selfishness, your love of ease, your lust of dominion.
And now, as she confronted Madeline, all her selfishness was alarmed. She waited in absolute fear the next words from the lips of her enemy. "You need not weary yourself by playing the invalid in my presence, madame," pursued the girl. "I am quite well aware that your illness has been all a sham. I know, too, that you have found the rôle of invalid very irksome."
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