Explore "Sweet Content" by Mary Louisa Molesworth on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
One of the hardest things about trying to be good, particularly about trying to be _better_, for that means getting out of bad ways as well as getting into good ones, is the dreadful persistence of bad habits. Even when your heart is quite, _quite_ in earnest, and your mind too, and often at the very time you're planning beautifully about keeping your new resolutions, and quite bubbling over with eagerness about them, you get a sudden shock, just as if you had walked straight into a bath of cold water that you didn't know was there -- and oh, dear, you stop to find you have done the exact wrong or foolish thing you had been fixing so to avoid.
How many times this happened to me about the new resolutions I wrote of in the last chapter I should be afraid to say. Sometimes it was almost laughable. One morning I remember I was busy writing down one or two rules I had thought might help me, when I heard mamma's voice calling me.