He would sit, grum enough, with his feet higher than his
head, chewing an unlighted cigar, and leave them both thankful
when he saw proper to go.
The truth is, Knowles was thoroughly out of place in these little
mending-shops called sick-chambers, where bodies are taken to
pieces, and souls set right. He had no faith in your slow,
impalpable cures: all reforms were to be accomplished by a
wrench, from the abolition of slavery to the pulling of a tooth.
He had no especial sympathy with Holmes, either: the men were
started in life from opposite poles: and with all the real
tenderness under his surly, rugged habit, it would have been hard
to touch him with the sudden doom fallen on this man, thrown
crippled and penniless upon the world, helpless, it might be, for
life. He would have been apt to tell you, savagely, that "he
wrought for it."
Besides, it made him out of temper to meet the sisters. Knowles
could have sketched for you with a fine decision of touch the
role played by the Papal power in the progress of humanity,--how
far it served as a stepping-stone, and the exact period when it
became a wearisome clog. The world was done with it now,--
utterly. Its breath was only poisoned, with coming death. So
the homely live charity of these women, their work, which no
other hands were ready to take, jarred against his abstract
theory, and irritated him, as an obstinate fact always does run
into the hand of a man who is determined to clutch the very heart
of a matter.
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