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Paul Faber, Surgeon by George MacDonald
page 283 of 555 (50%)
home and worked or read. She had to amuse herself, and sometimes found
life duller than when she had to earn her bread--when, as she went from
place to place, she might at any turn meet Paul upon Ruber or Niger.
Already the weary weed of the commonplace had begun to show itself in
the marriage garden--a weed which, like all weeds, requires only neglect
for perfect development, when it will drive the lazy Eve who has never
made her life worth _living_, to ask whether life be worth _having_. She
was not a great reader. No book had ever yet been to her a well-spring
of life; and such books as she liked best it was perhaps just as well
that she could not easily procure in Glaston; for, always ready to
appreciate the noble, she had not moral discernment sufficient to
protect her from the influence of such books as paint poor action in
noble color. For a time also she was stinted in her natural nourishment:
her husband had ordered a grand piano from London for her, but it had
not yet arrived; and the first touch she laid on the tall
spinster-looking one that had stood in the drawing-room for fifty years,
with red silk wrinkles radiating from a gilt center, had made her
shriek. If only Paul would buy a yellow gig, like his friend Dr. May of
Broughill, and take her with him on his rounds! Or if she had a friend
or two to go and see when he was out!--friends like what Helen or even
Dorothy might have been: she was not going to be hand-in-glove with any
body that didn't like her Paul! She missed church too--not the prayers,
much; but she did like hearing what she counted a good sermon, that is,
a lively one. Her husband wanted her to take up some science, but if he
had considered that, with all her gift in music, she expressed an utter
indifference to thorough bass, he would hardly have been so foolish.




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