“Yes, with pleasure,” said Miss Conyers. “Do you go every day?”
“Twice every day, in order to visit as many as I can. I go in the forenoon, return to dinner, and then go again in the afternoon. And, after all, so many are the hospitals, and so thickly are they crowded, that I can only visit each patient about twice a week, and then how I wish I could be in twenty wards at the same time. You must help me in the hospitals, Britomarte dear. There is so much to do. And when one has devoted all her time and strength and means to the work, and happily eased the sufferings of some scores, there are hundreds of others needing the same help.”
“I hope all our women are doing their duty in this crisis,” said Miss Conyers.
“They are doing what they can; but wives and mothers have very little time, and very little means either, in these war days, to bestow upon the poor soldiers; and young girls are generally inadmissible to the hospitals except at certain stated hours. Me—for some reason or other, perhaps for my respectable black dress and sedate aspect—the surgeons admit at any hour. And heaven has blessed me with ample means and ample leisure to devote to the sick and wounded soldiers.”
“Yours is an angel’s mission, my Minie; and you are worthy to be entrusted with it. You have been weighed in the balance, and not found wanting; you have passed through the fiery furnace of affliction, and come forth pure gold; you have been tried and found faithful; and you have been called to a much higher and holier destiny than would have been yours as the wife of——”
“Oh, don’t! don’t, Britomarte!” exclaimed Erminie, shrinking even from this light touch upon her unhealed wound.
Then reverting to the subject which they had first spoken, she said:
“It is a great school for the spirit—this to which I go. Volumes, libraries could not contain its lessons. Let one give all her time, strength and means to the sufferers there, and she will still receive more—infinitely more—than she gives.”
“In——”
“In the examples of almost superhuman patience, cheerfulness and fortitude among those brave men, who, wounded, mutilated, agonized, will never utter a complaint, will give you smile for smile, and receive with thankfulness any little gift the surgeons will allow you to offer them. Oh! how light seem my own troubles when I look upon theirs!”