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
which she cursed and abused her helper beyond sufferance. The nurse
suddenly grasped the unhappy woman's arms to shake some sense of
decency into her warped nature, one would have thought, but in truth
that eye might meet eye, and in this look the rare love, which can
persist through such provocation, awakened a soul. That look was at
once the revelation of the worth of the one and the worthlessness of
the other. A flood of tears drowned, it would seem forever, the evil
which was cursing. In a day, in an hour, the change was wrought, that
miraculous change which enters every life when the soul comes into its
own.
There were months in which the battle of self ebbed and flowed, but
never did defeat seem again imminent, and the final victory was found
in a high resolve which took her back home a quiet, subdued woman,
forgetful of self in her sense of debt to the sister whose goodness
she had never before admitted. For years they lived together, she
keeping the simple home and keeping it well, saving, industrious,
devoted, even loving. She has largely avoided publicity, though always
ready to nurse in emergencies. Nobly she is expiating the past, and
has long since worthily won the "well-done" of her moral self.
CHAPTER XIX
THE SUFFERING OF SELF-PITY
Alac MacReady was not much of an oarsman. Big and strong, and
heretofore so successful that his large self-confidence had never been
badly jolted, he was quite at a disadvantage, this June afternoon, as
he attempted to row pretty Annette Neil across the head of the lake to
where she said the fishing was good. Twice already he had splashed her
dainty, starched frock, ironed, he knew, in the highest perfection of
the art, by her own active, shapely, brown hands. And each awkward
splashing had been followed by flashing glances which shriveled self-
esteem even as they fascinated. They had planned to spend the sunset
hour fishing, then land in time to meet the crowd and be driven on to
Border City to a neighboring dance, and all come back to Geneva
together.
Alac's rural North-England training had developed in him many
qualifications of worth but, among these, boating was not one. Had he
told the truth when this little trip was planned, he would have
admitted that he had never rowed a boat a half-mile in his life.
Annette could do it tip-top; why not he? But things were
unquestionably perverse. The boat wouldn't go in a straight line-in
fact, it didn't go very fast anyway. The black eyes before him framed
by that impudently beautiful face, so pert, so naive, so
understandingly aware--so "damned handsome" he said to himself,
prodded him to redoubled effort. He was swinging his two hundred
pounds lustily, unevenly--an unusually vicious jerk, and snap went the
old oar! Off the seat he tumbled, and, with land-lubber's luck,
unshipped the other oar and away it floated, and a mile from land,
they drifted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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