Berenice broke in with indignant amazement, feeling her face burn.
"My man!" she exclaimed. "How dare you speak to me like that! Mr. Wynne is nothing to me. He's only a clergyman that was hurt saving my life."
She broke off with a laugh somewhat hysterical. Her nerves were not under control yet.
"I'm sure I didn't mean," wailed the girl, "to say anything wrong."
"There, there, Rosa," the other interrupted. "We are both upset. You shouldn't take so much for granted, or talk to me about 'men.'"
But in her mind the phrase repeated itself vexatiously: "your man."
IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING 1 Henry IV., v. 1.
The power of self-torture which the human heart possesses is well-nigh infinite. When one considers how futile are self-reproaches, self-examinations, remorses for faults and weaknesses; how vanity puts itself upon the rack and conscience inflicts envenomed wounds; how self tortures self until the whole man writhes in anguish, and in the end nothing is altered by all this pain, one might almost thank the gods for moral insensibility. Yet New England was founded upon the principle that this temper of mind develops manlihood; that inward struggles are the only discipline which can fit a human being for the outward conquest of life. The Puritans had power to subdue the wilderness, to overcome whatever obstacles interposed to the founding of a state and the establishing of the truth as they conceived it, because all these difficulties were accidents, outward and of comparative insignificance when set against the real life, which was within. If a heritage of self-consciousness has come down with the noble gifts which the forefathers have left to their children, it is at least part of the price paid for great things.
To Maurice that night only the pain and misery of his Puritan inheritance made themselves felt. Through the long hours he lacerated his heart and soul with repentance, with remorseful self-reproaches, enduring agony intense enough to be the reward meet for a crime. Fevered with the loss of blood, racked with the smart of bodily wounds, bruised and sore from the injuries of the accident, unable to move without torture in every joint, he yet forgot physical in mental suffering.