XVIII
AFFECTION
One of the ways in which our fears have power to wound us most
grievously is through our affections, and here we are confronted
with a real and crucial difficulty. Are we to hold ourselves in, to
check the impulses of affection, to use self-restraint, not
multiply intimacies, not extend sympathies? One sees every now and
then lives which have entwined themselves with every tendril of
passion and love and companionship and service round some one
personality, and have then been bereaved, with the result that the
whole life has been palsied and struck into desolation by the loss.
I am thinking now of two instances which I have known; one was a
wife, who was childless, and whose whole nature, every motive and
every faculty, became centred upon her husband, a man most worthy
of love. He died suddenly, and his wife lost everything at one
blow; not only her lover and comrade, but every occupation as well
which might have helped to distract her, because her whole life had
been entirely devoted to her husband; and even the hours when he
was absent from her had been given to doing anything and everything
that might save him trouble or vexation.
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