Put that against the other. Men
are not plaster saints--or, still less, live ones, with the power of
miracle; but struggling creatures of flesh and blood, who do, not what
they will, but what they can.
And suddenly he seemed once more to be writing to Lydia Penfold. How
often he had written to her during these two months! He recalled the joy
of the earlier correspondence, in which he had been his natural self,
pleading, arguing, planning; showing all the eagerness--the sincere
eagerness--there was in him, to make a decent job of his agency, to stand
well with his new neighbours--above all with "one slight girl."
And her letters to him--sweet, frank, intelligent, sympathetic--they had
been his founts of refreshing, his manna by the way. Until that fatal
night, when Melrose had crushed in him all that foolish optimism and
self-conceit with which he had entered into the original bargain! Since
then, he knew well that his letters had chilled and disappointed her;
they had been the letters of a slave.
And now this awful business at Mainstairs! Bessie Dobbs, the girl of
eighteen--Lydia's friend--who had been slowly dying since the diphtheria
epidemic of the year before, was dead at last, after much suffering; and
he did not expect to find the child of eight, her little sister, still
alive. There were nearly a score of other cases, and there were three
children down with scarlet fever, besides some terrible attacks of
blood-poisoning--one after childbirth--due probably to some form of the
scarlet fever infection, acting on persons weakened by the long effect of
filthy conditions.
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