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
The mother is Ethel Baxter Lord. She is thirty-eight, and Dick-boy is
just five. The mother's face is striking, striking as an example of
fine chiseling of features, each line standing for sensitiveness, and
each change revealing refinement of thought. The eyes and hair are
richly brown. Slender, graceful, perennially neat, she represents the
mother beautiful, the wife inspiring, the friend beloved. Happily as
we have seen her start a new day for Dick, did she always add some
cheer, some fineness of touch, some joy of word, some stimulating
helpfulness to every greeting, to every occasion.
The home was not pretentious. Thoroughly cozy, with many artistic
touches within, it snuggled on the heights near Arlington, the close
neighbor to many of the Nation's best memories, looking out on a noble
sweep of the fine, old Potomac, with glimpses through the trees of the
Nation's Capitol, glimpses revealing the best of its beauties. It was
a home from which emanated an atmosphere of peace and repose which one
seemed to feel even as one approached. It was a home pervaded with the
breath of happiness, a home which none entered without benefit.
The husband, Martin Lord, was an expert chemist who had long been in
the service of the Government. Capable, worthy, manly, he was blest in
what he was, and in what he had. They had been married eight years,
and the slipping away of the first child, Margaret, was the only
sadness which had paused at their door. Mrs. Lord had been Ethel
Baxter for thirty years. Her father was an intense, high-strung
business man, an importer, who spent much time in Europe where he died
of an American-contracted typhoid-fever, when Ethel was ten. Her
mother was one of a large well-known Maryland family, fair, brown-eyed
too, and frail; also, by all the rights of inheritance, training and
development, sensitive and nervous. In her family the precedents of
blue blood were religiously maintained with so much emphasis on the
"blue" that no beginning was ever made in training her into a
protective robustness. So, in spite of elaborate preparation and noted
New York skill and the highest grade of conscientious nursing, she
recovered poorly after Ethel's birth. Strength, even such as she
formerly had, did not return. She didn't want to be an invalid. She
was devoted to her husband and eager to companion and mother her
child. The surgeons thought her recovery lay in their skill, and in
ten years one operated twice, and two others operated once each, but
for some reason the scalpel's edge did not reach the weakness. Then
Mr. Baxter died, and all of her physical discomforts seemed
intensified until, in desperation, the fifth operation was undertaken,
which was long and severe, and from which she failed to react. So
Ethel was an orphan at eleven, though not alone, for the good uncle,
her mother's brother, took her to his home and never failed to respond
to any impulse through which he felt he could fulfil the fatherhood
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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