“Doctor! about your other patient!”
“Well?”
“Is he as bad as I am? For indeed, my dear friend, I feel—my food has no taste—life itself no savor. I used to go singing, now I sit sighing. Is he as bad as I am?”
“I'll tell you the truth; his malady is as strong as yours; but he has the great advantage of being a man; and, again, of being a man of brains. He is a worker, and an inventor; and now, instead of succumbing tamely to his disorder, he is working double tides, and inventing with all his might, in order to remove an obstacle between him and one he loves with all his manly soul. A contest so noble and so perpetual sustains and fortifies the mind. He is indomitable; only, at times, his heart of steel will soften, and then he has fits of deep dejection and depression, which I mourn to see; for his manly virtues, and his likeness to one I loved deeply in my youth, have made him dear to me.”
During this Grace turned her head away, and, ere the doctor ended, her tears were flowing freely; for to her, being a woman, this portrait of a male struggle with sorrow was far more touching than any description of feminine and unresisted grief could be: and, when the doctor said he loved his patient, she stole her little hand into his in a way to melt Old Nick, if he is a male. Ladies, forgive the unchivalrous doubt.
“Doctor,” said she, affecting all of a sudden a little air of small sprightliness, very small, “now, do—you—think—it would do your patient—the least good in the world—if you were to take him this?”
She handed him her work, and then she blushed divinely.
“Why, it is a figure of Hope.”
“Yes.”
“I think it might do him a great deal of good.”