I only told you
because you wanted to help us. Help offers are the silver linings to
trouble clouds, and you brought this one down on yourself, didn't you?
Of course, it's selfish and wrong to tell people about your anxieties,
but there is just no other way to get so close to a friend. Don't you
think perhaps sometimes the Lord doesn't bother to 'temper the winds,'
but just leads you up on the sheltered side of somebody who is
stronger than you are and leaves you there until your storm is over?"
CHAPTER II
THE FOLKS-GARDEN
"Well," said Uncle Tucker meditatively, "I reckon a festibul on a
birthday can be taken as a kind of compliment to the Lord and no
special glorification to yourself. He instuted your first one Himself,
and I see no harm in jest a-marking of the years He sends you. What
are Sister Viney's special reasons against the junket?"
"Oh, I don't know what makes Aunt Viney feel this way!" exclaimed Rose
Mary with distress in her blue eyes that she raised to Uncle Tucker's,
that were bent benignly upon her as she stood in the barn door beside
him. "She says that as the Lord has granted her her fourscore years by
reason of great strength, she oughtn't to remind Him that He has
forgotten her by having an eighty-second birthday. Everybody in
Sweetbriar has been looking forward to it for a week, and it was going
to be such a lovely party. What shall we do? She says she just won't
have it, and Aunt Amandy is crying when Aunt Viney don't see it.
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