' Yet
the want, absurd and impracticable as it was, not only remained
fixed immovably in her heart, but grew in intensity day by day.
Her wretchedness deepened into a morbid melancholy. Everything
about her was vile, and she herself, it was clear, to have
deserved such misery, was even viler than her surroundings. Yes,
she had sinned--'standing before God's judgment seat'. 'No one,'
she declared, 'has so grieved the Holy Spirit'; of that she was
quite certain. It was in vain that she prayed to be delivered
from vanity and hypocrisy, and she could not bear to smile or to
be gay, 'because she hated God to hear her laugh, as if she had
not repented of her sin'.
A weaker spirit would have been overwhelmed by the load of such
distresses-- would have yielded or snapped. But this
extraordinary young woman held firm, and fought her way to
victory. With an amazing persistency, during the eight years that
followed her rebuff over Salisbury Hospital, she struggled and
worked and planned. While superficially she was carrying on the
life of a brilliant girl in high society, while internally she
was a prey to the tortures of regret and of remorse, she yet
possessed the energy to collect the knowledge and to undergo the
experience which alone could enable her to do what she had
determined she would do in the end.
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