Need enough there was of it
too. See, what a perfect damask mother!
_Mrs. G_. Draw the curtain on that sunshine there. This sleep has
flushed her. Ay, a painter might have dropped that golden hair,--yet
this delicate beauty is but the martyr's wreath now, with its fine nerve
and shrinking helplessness. No, Annie; put away your hat, my love,--you
cannot go to the lodge to-night.
_Annie_. Mother?
_Mrs. G_. You cannot go to the glen to-night. This is no time for idle
pleasure, God knows.
_Annie_. Why, you have been weeping in earnest, and your cheek is
pale.--And now I know where that sad appointment led you. Is it over?
That it should be in our humanity to bear, what in our ease we cannot,
_cannot_ think of!
_Mrs. G_. Harder things for humanity are there than bodily anguish,
sharp though it be. It was not the boy,--the mother's anguish, I wept
for, Annie.
_Annie_. Poor Endross! And he will go, to his dying day, a crippled
thing. But yesterday I saw him springing by so proudly! And the
mother----
_Mrs. G_. "_Words, words_," she answered sternly when I tried to comfort
her; "ay, words are easy.
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