He said one day, "It was not the sensual or the timid or the
ill-tempered boys who used to make me anxious. Those were definite
faults and brought definite punishment; it was the hard-hearted,
virtuous, ambitious, sensible boys, who were good-humoured and
respectable and selfish, who bothered me; one wanted to shake them as a
terrier shakes a rat--but there was nothing to get hold of. They were a
credit to themselves and to their parents and to the school; and yet
they went downhill with every success."
Anna was a woman of singularly unselfish and courageous temperament. She
had been, in the course of her last life upon earth, a hospital nurse;
and she used to speak gratefully of the long periods when she was
nursing some anxious case, when she had interchanged day and night,
sleeping when the world was awake, and sitting with a book or needlework
by the sick-bed, through the long darkness. "People used to say to me
that it must be so depressing; but those were my happiest hours, as the
dark brightened into dawn, when many of the strange mysteries of life
and pain and death gave up their secrets to me.
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