When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to
him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the
shadow of a change and the chill of a shock. He immediately began
to imagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of
her peril as the direct menace for himself of personal privation.
This indeed gave him one of those partial recoveries of equanimity
that were agreeable to him--it showed him that what was still first
in his mind was the loss she herself might suffer. "What if she
should have to die before knowing, before seeing--?" It would have
been brutal, in the early stages of her trouble, to put that
question to her; but it had immediately sounded for him to his own
concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry for her.
If she did "know," moreover, in the sense of her having had some--
what should he think?--mystical irresistible light, this would make
the matter not better, but worse, inasmuch as her original adoption
of his own curiosity had quite become the basis of her life. She
had been living to see what would BE to be seen, and it would quite
lacerate her to have to give up before the accomplishment of the
vision.
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