Our only hope is that she will find the
conditions so utterly discouraging at the very start that she will give it
up and come home. If you are a man you will help to make them so. She has
promised to stay with that country girl with whom she contracted such an
incomprehensible friendship at Miss Jennings's.
"Oh, James, pray for grace to be a man once in your life and send her back
to us! Be a man--try to be a man! Remember the angel you killed! Remember
all we have done for you and what a return you have made, and be a man for
the first time. Try and be a man!
"Your unhappy sister-in-law,
"MARTHA SHERWOOD."
Mr. Fisbee read the letter with a great, rising delight which no sense of
duty could down; indeed, he perceived that his sense of duty had ceased to
conflict with the one strong hope of his life, just as he perceived that
to be a man, according to Martha Sherwood, was, in part, to assist Martha
Sherwood to have her way in things; and, for the rest, to be the sort of
man she persuaded herself she would be were she not a woman. This he had
never been able to be.
By some whimsy of fate, or by a failure of Karma (or, perhaps, by some
triumph of Kismetic retribution), James Fisbee was born in one of the most
business-like and artless cities of a practical and modern country, of
money-getting, money-saving parents, and he was born a dreamer of the
past.
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