re dealing now with pain. My simple practical thesis is that pain
comes to all soon or late, that the indirect consequences are most to be
feared, and that endurance in the adult, rational endurance, must be won
by a gradual education, which can hardly begin too early. But of what
use are these stern lessonings in the bearing of what none can quite
escape? Do they enable us to diminish pain or to feel it less?
Indirectly, yes. One woman cries out for instant easement if in pain or
distress, unschooled to endure. She claims immediate relief. Another,
more resolute, submits with patience, does not give way, as we put it,
tries to distract her attention, knowing that even as distinct suffering
as toothache may be less felt in the presence of something which
interests the mind and secures the attention. Nothing, indeed, is more
instructive than to watch how women bear pain,--the tremendous calamity
it is to one, the far slighter thing in life it is to another. I speak
now of transient torments. When we come to consider those years of
torture which cruel nature holds in store for some, no one blames the
sight of the moral wreck it is apt to make of the sufferer. On the other
hand, there is nothing I ever see in my profession so splendid as the
way in which a few, a rare few, triumph over pain, which we know must
often rise to the grade of anguish, and from which scarce a day is ever
free.

I recall well one woman who for years, under my eyes, was the subject of
what, with due sense of the force of the word, I call torture. At times
she shut herself up in her room, and, as she said, "wrestled with it."
This happened every day or two for an hour or more. The rest of the time
she was out, or busy with her duties, but always in some pain.
Meanwhile, although failing slowly, she was the life and joy of many,
the true and gentle counsellor, the sure support of all who leaned on
her for aid. At her dinner-table, in chat with friends, or over a book,
no one who did not know her well could have dreamed that she was in such
pain as consigns lower natures to disability. Her safeguard from utter
wreck was a clear and resolute faith, a profound and unfailing interest
in men and things and books, which gave strange vigor to her whole range
of intellectual activities. But above all she possessed that happiest of
gifts, the keen, undying sense of the humorous, the absurd, the witty.
As she once said, "All life laughs for me." It followed her