danger comes: more attempts to save. Always the situation of sailors
on a foundering vessel. Sometimes it seemed to me that this was done on
purpose, that my wife feigned anxiety in order to conquer me, since that
solved the question so simply for her benefit. It seemed to me that all
that she did at those times was done for its effect upon me, but now I
see that she herself, my wife, suffered and was tortured on account of
the little ones, their health, and their diseases.

"A torture to both of us, but to her the children were also a means of
forgetting herself, like an intoxication. I often noticed, when she was
very sad, that she was relieved, when a child fell sick, at being able
to take refuge in this intoxication. It was involuntary intoxication,
because as yet there was nothing else. On every side we heard that Mrs.
So-and-so had lost children, that Dr. So-and-so had saved the child
of Mrs. So-and-so, and that in a certain family all had moved from the
house in which they were living, and thereby saved the little ones. And
the doctors, with a serious air, confirmed this, sustaining my wife in
her opinions. She was not prone to fear, but the doctor dropped some
word, like corruption of the blood, scarlatina, or else--heaven help
us--diphtheria, and off she went.

"It was impossible for it to be otherwise. Women in the old days had the
belief that 'God has given, God has taken away,' that the soul of the
little angel is going to heaven, and that it is better to die innocent
than to die in sin. If the women of to-day had something like this
faith, they could endure more peacefully the sickness of their children.
But of all that there does not remain even a trace. And yet it is
necessary to believe in something; consequently they stupidly believe in
medicine, and not even in medicine, but in the doctor. One believes in
X, another in Z, and, like all believers, they do not see the idiocy of