City and town life -- Fiction; Didactic fiction; Indiana -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction
"I've got to know," said Mr. Minturn, "but I've no faith in her ability
to change, and no desire to meet her if she has."
"Humph!" said Leslie. "That proves that you need some changing
yourself."
"I certainly do," said James Minturn. "If I could have an operation on
my brain which would remove that particular cell in which is stored the
memory of the past ten years----"
"You will when you see her," said Leslie, "and she'll be your surgeon."
"Impossible!" he cried.
"Go find her," said Leslie. "You must to regain peace for yourself."
James Minturn returned a troubled man, but with viewpoint shifting so
imperceptibly he did not realize what was happening. On his way he
decided to visit the hospital, repugnant as the thought was to him.
From afar he was amazed at sight of the building. He knew instantly
that it must have been the leading topic of conversation among his
friends purposely avoided in his presence. Marble pillars and
decorations had been freshly cleaned, the building was snowdrift white;
it shone through the branches of big trees surrounding it like a fairy
palace. At the top of the steps leading to the entrance stood a marble
group of heroic proportions that was wonderful. It was a seated figure
of Christ, but cut with the face of a man of his station, occupation,
and race, garbed in simple robe, and in his arms, at his knees, leaning
against him, a group of children: the lean, sick and ailing, such as
were carried to him for healing. Cut in the wall above it in large
gold-filled letters was the admonition: "Suffer little children to come
unto me."
That group was the work of a student and a thinker who could carry an
idea to a logical conclusion, and then carve it from marble. The
thought it gave James Minturn, arrested before it, was not the
stereotyped idea of Christ, not the conventional reproduction of
childhood. It impressed on Mr. Minturn's brain that the man of Galilee
had lived in the form of other men of his day, and that such a face,
filled with infinite compassion, was much stronger and more forceful
than that of the mild feminine countenance he had been accustomed to
associating with the Saviour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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