Bitter questionings filled Ernestine's heart in those days. How was she
going to watch him suffer and not hate a universe permitting his
sufferings? How care for a world of beauty he could not see? How watch
his heart break for the work taken from him and keep her belief in an
order of things under which that was enacted? How love a world that had
turned upon him like that? That was what he asked her to do. It seemed to
her, now, impossible.
With him, as the bearing of the physical pain grew mechanical and the
other things grew nearer, the worst of it was wondering what he should do
with the days that were ahead. His spirit would not go with his sight.
His desire to do was not to be crushed with his ability for doing. What
then of the empty days to come? How smother the passion for his work? And
if he did smother it, what remained? While he lived, how deafen himself
to the call of life? Through what channel could he hope to work out the
things that were in him? And how remain himself if constantly denying to
himself the things which were his? It was that tormented him more than
the relinquishing of the specific thing he had believed would crown the
work of his life.
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