He looks to me as if he had
loved too many books and too few people; as if he had tried vainly
to fill his heart and life with antiquities, which of all things,
perhaps, are the most bloodless, the least warming and nourishing
when taken in excess or as a steady diet. Himself (God bless him!)
shall never have that patient look, if I can help it; but how it
will appeal to Salemina! There are women who are born to be petted
and served, and there are those who seem born to serve others.
Salemina's first idea is always to make tangled things smooth (like
little Broona's curly hair); to bring sweet and discreet order out
of chaos; to prune and graft and water and weed and tend things,
until they blossom for very shame under her healing touch. Her mind
is catholic, well ordered, and broad,--for ever full of other
people's interests, never of her own: and her heart always seems to
me like some dim, sweet-scented guest-chamber in an old New England
mansion, cool and clean and quiet, and fragrant of lavender. It has
been a lovely, generous life, lived for the most part in the shadow
of other people's wishes and plans and desires. I am an impatient
person, I confess, and heaven seems so far away when certain things
are in question: the righting of a child's wrong, or the demolition
of a barrier between two hearts; above all, for certain surgical
operations, more or less spiritual, such as removing scales from
eyes that refuse to see, and stops from ears too dull to hear.
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