I have
grown irritable, suspicious, hard to live with. Yet with all my
heart and soul I desire to be patient, tolerant, kindly, sweet-
tempered. FitzGerald said somewhere that ill-health makes all of us
villains. This is the worst of it, that for all my efforts I get
weaker, more easily vexed, more discontented. I do not and cannot
trace the smallest benefit which results to me or any one else from
my unhappiness. The shadow of it has even fallen over my relations
with the children, who are angelically good. Maggie, with that
divine instinct which women possess--what a perfectly beautiful
thing it is!--has somehow contrived to discern that things are
amiss with me, and I can perceive that she tries all that her
little heart and mind can devise to please, soothe, interest me.
But I do not want to be ministered to, exquisite as the instinct is
in the child; and all the time I am as far off my object as ever. I
cannot work, I cannot think. I have said fine things in my books
about the discipline of reluctant suffering; and now my feeling is
that I could bear any other kind of trial better. It seems to be
given to me with an almost demoniacal prescience of what should
most dishearten me.
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