Many good people are such
sticklers for the proprieties! For myself, I take joyous refuge
with the grand, simple, every-day humanity of the man I find in
the story--the man with the heart like that of my father and my
mother and my brothers and sisters. If I may but see and help to
show him a little as he lived to show himself, and not as church
talk and church ways and church ceremonies and church theories
and church plans of salvation and church worldliness generally
have obscured him for hundreds of years, and will yet obscure him
for hundreds more!
Toward evening, when she had just rendered him one of the many
attentions he required, and which there was no one that day but
herself to render, for he would scarcely allow Mewks to enter the
room, he said to her:
"Thank you; you are very good to me. I shall remember you. Not
that I think I'm going to die just yet; I've often been as bad as
this, and got quite well again. Besides, I want to show that I
have turned over a new leaf. Don't you think God will give me one
more chance, now that I really mean it? I never did before."
"God can tell whether you mean it without that," she answered,
not daring to encourage him where she knew nothing. "But you said
you would remember me, Mr. Redmain: I hope you didn't mean in
your will."
"I did mean in my will," he answered, but in a tone of
displeasure.
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