'DEAR NELL,--Thank you for your kind note; it was just like you to
write it _though_ it was your school-day. I never knew you to let a
slight impediment stand in the way of a friendly action.
'Certainly I shall not soon forget last Friday, and _never_, I think,
the evening and night succeeding that morning and afternoon. Evils
seldom come singly. And soon after Mr. Taylor was gone, papa, who
had been better, grew much worse. He went to bed early, and was very
sick and ill for an hour; and when at last he began to doze, and I
left him, I came down to the dining-room with a sense of weight,
fear, and desolation hard to express and harder to endure. A wish
that you were with me _did_ cross my mind, but I repulsed it as a
most selfish wish; indeed, it was only short-lived: my natural
tendency in moments of this sort is to get through the struggle
alone--to think that one is burdening and racking others makes all
worse.
'You speak to me in soft consolating accents, but I hold far sterner
language to myself, dear Nell.
'An absence of five years--a dividing expanse of three oceans--the
wide difference between a man's active career and a woman's passive
existence--these things are almost equivalent to an eternal
separation.
Pages:
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483