Somehow the trip was made. But it was a desperately sick girl, the mere shell of a life, that they returned to America. It was weeks before she realized where she was and other weeks before she was able to tell Dr. Kingsley so that he could understand it all--not only of sorrow's final revelation, but this time, what she had not mentioned before, of Georgia--the family disgrace. She did not know the wonderful power of Christian counsel and ideals to save from the so- often misinterpreted sufferings of wrong spiritual adjustments. She had not realized the healing power of the love of God expressed in the lives of good men and women, and how it can sweeten the bitterness and dissipate even the paralyzing loneliness of an impossible human love. Dr. Kingsley's eyes had welled with tears when she told the story of Georgia. How impellingly gentle was his voice when he said, "You'll forgive her now, I know." Forgive her! What else to do, when he made it so noble and beautiful and right. So when she was strong enough, she began looking for the sister who had so complicated the years, and, through an old school-friend, traced her to a little flat. And it was even as her mother had thought. Georgia had married, "beneath the family," she told Minta, the Georgia who was too proud to ever write again. She was living in Brooklyn, the wife of Randolph, an assistant engineer on an ocean steamship. And Etta came to visit Georgia, and a great load, a load of which she had, through the years, been unconscious, slipped away as Minta let go her enmity. "In all things," she said to Dr. Kingsley, "I am your obedient patient-all things but one. I will work, and I shall work." And she does work. No one understands how. Seventy-odd pounds of frailty, with eyes which are ever resentful of the use to which she puts them; with the recurrence of suffering which wrings every ounce of physical strength, which for days holds her mind writhing as on the rack, which tortures her to physical and mental surrender, but which, through the lengthening years, has been impotent to daunt her regal spirit. And she gives, gives on through the days of relative comfort, gives of her cheer which comes from, no one knows where; gives, spontaneously, kindness which has multiplied her lovers, both men and women; and gives of her ability which is unquestioned. There are a few publishers who know her skill. There is a touch of pathos in all she draws, pathos-never bitterness, never ugliness-always the breath of beauty. Minta Southard, hopelessly defective in what we call health, has triumphed through the harmony of a brave adjustment to her pitiless limitations-a harmony realized by few, even though rich, in resource of mind, powerful, in reserve of body. Can we ignore the omnipotence of the spiritual? End of Project Gutenberg's Our Nervous Friends, by Robert S. Carroll