Her illness,
whatever it may have been, was certainly not inconvenient. It
involved seclusion; and an extraordinary, an unparalleled
seclusion was, it might almost have been said, the mainspring of
Miss Nightingale's life. Lying on her sofa in the little upper
room in South Street, she combined the intense vitality of a
dominating woman of the world with the mysterious and romantic
quality of a myth. She was a legend in her lifetime, and she knew
it. She tasted the joys of power, like those Eastern Emperors
whose autocratic rule was based upon invisibility, with the
mingled satisfactions of obscurity and fame.
And she found the machinery of illness hardly less effective as a
barrier against the eyes of men than the ceremonial of a palace.
Great statesmen and renowned generals were obliged to beg for
audiences; admiring princesses from foreign countries found that
they must see her at her own time, or not at all; and the
ordinary mortal had no hope of ever getting beyond the downstairs
sitting-room and Dr. Sutherland. For that indefatigable disciple
did, indeed, never desert her. He might be impatient, he might be
restless, but he remained. His 'incurable looseness of thought',
for so she termed it, continued at her service to the end. Once,
it is true, he had actually ventured to take a holiday; but he
was recalled, and he did not repeat the experiment.
Pages:
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238