Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of NervousnessCarroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Science
Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness
Carroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Nervous system -- Hygiene
Yes, it seemed cruel. Three days and nights they were on the sleeper;
forty miles they drove over increasingly poor roads to the big ranch
in the Montana foot-hills where everybody else seemed so well, so
coarsely well, she thought. After the first week the aspirin and the
veronal gave out and there was no "earthly chance" of getting more.
Then when she refused to exercise, she got nothing to eat but a glass
of warm milk with a slice of miserably coarse bread crumbed in, and
the mountain air did make her hungry; and when she was ugly, she was
left alone, absolutely alone in that dreary room, and even Lee, the
Chinese cook, wouldn't look in the window when she begged him for
something else to eat. How she did love Rosie those "weary days of
abuse"! Miss Leighton was always polite, though she would not stay
with her a minute when she got "fussy," but would be gone for an hour,
visiting and laughing and carrying on with the men-folks in the big-
room. She had seemed so kind before they left the East and she was
kind now, at times when she had her own way, but she was being paid to
nurse a sick girl, and she had no right to leave her alone for hours
simply because she whined or refused to do her bidding on the instant.
There was a young doctor there who could have helped her if he would,
but he had no more heart than the rest, and when the nurse called him
in to make an examination, he was as noncommittal as a sphinx and gave
her no speck of satisfaction, only telling her to do what the nurse
said. Bitter letters she sent home, but somehow they all were answered
by Dr. Franklin, who wrote her little notes in reply which made her
angry--then ashamed. Verbal outbreaks there were, and physical ones,
too, a few times, which the nurse calmly and humiliatingly credited to
her exercise-account and brought her more to eat, saying that
scrapping was as healthful as work in making strength. But somehow,
she couldn't hate Miss Leighton long, as behind all her "cruelty"
Wanda realized that a thoughtful friendship was ever waiting. One day
they took a drive; when four miles from the ranch-house something
happened, and they were asked to get out. They stood looking off over
the ever-climbing hills to those remote, granite castles of the far
Rockies.
The team started, and as they turned, the driver waved his apparent
regrets. They walked back--four miles. Wanda had not performed such a
feat in nearly twenty years. She walked off her resentment, in truth
she was a bit proud, and the nurse certainly did bring her a fine
supper, the first square meal she had been given in Montana. This was
the turning point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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