"What you need," said her friend, the great physician, "is change. Change and rest. Where can you go and be sure of absolute quiet?" "I cannot tell you," she said wearily, "there is always something that I must do——" "——or think that you must do," he interrupted her. "It is all the same," she said. [Pg 44]He sighed, and looked at her quietly for a long time. [Pg 44] "It has taken me fifty years to learn that, my dear child," said he, "and you toss it at me in a moment's talk. Since you have learned it, why are you not well and happy?" "Since I have learned it, I can never be," she told him, and again he looked long at her. "What is that that you are trying to do?" he asked her at last. "Think carefully and tell me in one sentence." "I have already thought carefully," she said, "and I can tell you. I am trying to live my husband's life, which I ought not to give up, my children's life, which I must not give up, and my own life, which I cannot give up." He looked even longer than before at her and the late sun slipped down the polished fittings of his desk and down the gilded covers of the book-filled shelves behind him. Longer than before he looked[Pg 45] and the lines deepened in his face and his eyes seemed to grow deeper in his head as she looked back at him. At last he spoke. [Pg 45] "My child," he said, "if I were a poor and hungry doctor it is not to be doubted that I should give you something in a bottle and tell you to come to me again. But I am a wealthy physician and I can afford to tell you truth. I can do nothing for you. You must cure yourself, or fail to do it so completely that I shall be needed to enable you to fail again. When you have repeated this last process sufficiently, I shall no longer be thus enabled and you will die. That is all." "Die?" said she; "I shall die?" "You will die," he said, "with everything that the world calls good fortune in your lap. With no excuse for doing so, but with every reason to be glad that you are doing so. Leaving behind you someone who needed
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