For her nature reached down to the perennial, and she had kept a child's capacity to be happy in small, everyday pleasures.

It was always such an easy thing to please her and so difficult for little frets to annoy her.
Harry's inconsequent, thoughtless ways would have worried and tried some women to the uttermost, for he was frequently less thoughtful and less helpful than he should have been.

But Lucy was slow to notice or to believe any wrong of her husband and even if it was made evident to her she was ready to forgive it, ready to throw over his little tempers, his hasty rudenesses, and his never-absent selfishness, the cloak of her merciful manifest love.
"What a loving little woman she is!" thought John, but really what affected him most was her constant cheerfulness.

No fear could make her doubt and she welcomed the first gleam of hope with smiles that filled the house with the sunshine of her sure and fortunate expectations.

How did she do it?
Then there flashed across John's mind the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Thou meetest him _that rejoiceth_, and worketh righteousness." God does not go to meet the complaining and the doubting and the inefficient.