It
is from their want of this faith, and their consequent arrogance
and conceit, that the ladies who aspire to help in hospitals give
the doctors so much trouble: they have not yet learned
_obedience,_ the only path to any good, the one essential to
the saving of the world. One who can not obey is the merest
slave--essentially and in himself a slave. The crisis of Tom's
fever was at length favorably passed, but the result remained
doubtful. By late hours and strong drink, he had done not a
little to weaken a constitution, in itself, as I have said, far
from strong; while the unrest of what is commonly and foolishly
called a bad conscience, with misery over the death of his child
and the conduct which had disgraced him in his own eyes and
ruined his wife's happiness, combined to retard his recovery.
While he was yet delirious, and grief and shame and consternation
operated at will on his poetic nature, the things he kept saying
over and over were very pitiful; but they would have sounded more
miserable by much in the ears of one who did not look so far
ahead as Mary. She, trained to regard all things in their true
import, was rejoiced to find him loathing his former self, and
beyond the present suffering saw the gladness at hand for the
sorrowful man, the repenting sinner. Had she been mother or
sister to him, she could hardly have waited on him with more
devotion or tenderness.
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