“I shall have to be judge of your conduct, if you desire to retain my friendship and respect.”
“But that is not my desire. My desire is to get Reginald Grove well,” she said quietly, holding Judge Elkhorn steady in the light of her self-directing intelligence, until, without more words, he himself saw that he had supposed her general friendliness for him was identified with an enfeebling dependence on his approbation.
Then—
“Mrs. Mancredo, what will you do for this man?” Ethel cheerily asked.
“What can I do?”
“You could take Reginald away from the hotel-life which you dislike, and which you find so injurious to both of you; and you could get a nice, rightly adjusted home. And then, from the pure potencies of your splendid being, you could second nature’s recuperative forces in him; and they, unthwarted and assisted thus by you, will build him up again into health of body, by giving him a new affluence of mind. Then mind will recreate the body. To accomplish this would perhaps take years of real mothering-wit and wisdom. But—”
“Years, Ethelbert? I should be an old woman by that time, near my fifties. What is a woman worth then? And what would this rejuvenated young scholar care for me? I mean—this is nonsense; and yes, what would I be by that time?”
“You would be a woman who at least would have achieved one defined object in life. You are now sick of existence. Money spending, dressing, dining, and days spent in wishing that things and men were different, have given your active imagination and non-concentrated powers no comfort for years past. Neither could you get much good by running up and down the world, trying to get an audience to listen to your theories. Absolute, concentrated personal work, done well, on the spot you stand on, will not fatigue you any more than does the toil of mere self-exhibit and self-protection from the inroads of others on your property and yourself. You say twelve years hence you will be a woman in the fifties, if you give these years to work. How old will you be twelve years hence if you don’t?”
“There are always asylums and skilled people,” she suggested, trembling with alarm, not so much at the work, as at undertaking to settle herself to a twelve-years’ job for him. She was very pale, and looked toward the man with a shrinking, like that in the eyes of a dumb creature being led at last to the altar of final sacrifice.
“Yes,” said Ethelbert, “there are always asylums; and they are getting fuller and fuller of people who know so ill how to deal with time, that fearing, faltering and fightings have landed them there to die, while their friends outside, fearing, faltering and fighting against their fears, soon need asylums, too. This man’s trembling intellect would be ruined by a few months in the average insane asylum. You say you would be an old woman at fifty if you tried to save that man; tell me, then, what will you be if you don’t?”