"If you would free yourself from the coils of an intense and selfish egoism that fetter you to the petty cares and trials of your individual existence,--if you would endeavor to forget for a season the woes of Mrs. Gerome, and expend a little more sympathy on the sorrows of others,--if you would resolve to lose sight of the caprices that render you so unpopular, and make some human being happy by your aid and kind words,--in fine, if, instead of selecting as your model some cynical, half-insane woman like Lady Hester Stanhope, you chose for imitation the example of noble Christian usefulness and self-abnegation, analogous to that of Florence Nightingale, or Mrs. Fry, you would soon find that your conscience--" "Enough! You weary me. Dr. Grey, I thoroughly understand your motives, and honor their purity, but I beg that you will give yourself no further anxiety on my account. You cannot, from your religious standpoint, avoid regarding me as worse than a heathen, and have constituted yourself a missionary to reclaim and consecrate me. I am not quite a cannibal, ready to devour you, by way of recompense for your charitable efforts in my behalf, but I must assure you your interest and sympathy are sadly wasted. Do you remember that celebrated 'vase of Soissons,' which was plundered by rude soldiery in Rheims, and which Clovis so eagerly coveted at the distribution of the spoils? A soldier broke it before the king's hungry eyes, and forced him to take the worthless mocking fragments. Even so flint-faced fate shattered my happiness, and tauntingly offers me the ruins; but I will none of it!" "Trust God's overruling mercy, and those fragments, fused in the furnace of affliction, may be remoulded and restored to you in pristine perfection."