"Tell mother it's nothing! Tell mother, quick, it's nothing!"
cried the magnanimous child as soon as she could speak.
The same child fell over the rail of a staircase and was obliged to lie
for some ten days on her back, so that the strained but not broken little
body might recover itself. Every movement was, in a measure, painful;
and there was a long captivity, a helplessness enforced and guarded by
twinges, a constant impossibility to yield to the one thing that had
carried her through all her years--impulse. A condition of acute
consciousness was imposed upon a creature whose first condition of life
had been unconsciousness; and this during the long period of ten of a
child's days and nights at eight years old.
Yet during every hour of the time the child was not only gay but patient,
not fitfully, but steadily, resigned, sparing of requests, reluctant to
be served, inventive of tender and pious little words that she had never
used before. "You are exquisite to me, mother," she said, at receiving
some common service.
Even in the altering and harassing conditions of fever, a generous child
assumes the almost incredible attitude of deliberate patience. Not that
illness is to be trusted to work so. There is another child who in his
brief indispositions becomes invincible, armed against medicine finally.
The last appeal to force, as his distracted elders find, is all but an
impossibility; but in any case it would be a failure.
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