"No one who knows you can mistake your words, except wilfully," returned
Percivale courteously.

"Thank you," I said. "Now I will just ask you, in reference to the contrast
between human life and nature, how you will go back to your work in London,
after seeing all this child's and other play of Nature? Suppose you had
had nothing here but rain and high winds and sea-fogs, would you have been
better fitted for doing something to comfort those who know nothing of such
influences than you will be now? One of the most important qualifications
of a sick-nurse is a ready smile. A long-faced nurse in a sickroom is a
visible embodiment and presence of the disease against which the eager life
of the patient is fighting in agony. Such ought to be banished, with their
black dresses and their mourning-shop looks, from every sick-chamber, and
permitted to minister only to the dead, who do not mind looks. With what a
power of life and hope does a woman--young or old I do not care--with a
face of the morning, a dress like the spring, a bunch of wild flowers in
her hand, with the dew upon them, and perhaps in her eyes too (I don't
object to that--that is sympathy, not the worship of darkness),--with
what a message from nature and life does she, looking death in the face
with a smile, dawn upon the vision of the invalid! She brings a little
health, a little strength to fight, a little hope to endure, actually lapt
in the folds of her gracious garments; for the soul itself can do more than
any medicine, if it be fed with the truth of life."

"But are you not--I beg your pardon for interposing on your eloquence with
dull objection," said Percivale--"are you not begging all the question?
_Is_ life such an affair of sunshine and gladness?"

"If life is not, then I confess all this show of nature is worse than
vanity--it is a vile mockery. Life is gladness; it is the death in it that