No doubt, if
she had lived today, and if her experience had lain, not among
cholera cases at Scutari, but among yellow-fever cases in Panama,
she would have declared fresh air a fetish, and would have
maintained to her dying day that the only really effective way of
dealing with disease was by the destruction of mosquitoes.
Yet her mind, so positive, so realistic, so ultra-practical, had
its singular revulsions, its mysterious moods of mysticism and of
doubt. At times, lying sleepless in the early hours, she fell
into long, strange, agonised meditations, and then, seizing a
pencil, she would commit to paper the confessions of her soul.
The morbid longings of her pre-Crimean days came over her once
more; she filled page after page with self-examination, self-
criticism, self-surrender. 'Oh Father,' she wrote, 'I submit, I
resign myself, I accept with all my heart, thisstretching out of
Thy hand to save me. ... 0h how vain it is, the vanity of
vanities, to live in men's thoughts instead of God's!'
She was lonely, she was miserable. 'Thou knowest that through all
these horrible twenty years, I have been supported by the belief
that I was working with Thee who would bring everyone, even our
poor nurses, to perfection'--and yet, after all, what was the
result? Had not even she been an unprofitable servant? One night,
waking suddenly, she saw, in the dim light of the night-lamp,
tenebrous shapes upon the wall.
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