Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/322

 George Judson gave himself up to longer hours of unremitting toil than he had known since boyhood. He punished himself with work. His dissipation was work. His life became one long debauch of work, work, work! Work that prospered now as no work of his had ever prospered before. But there were also times when hope and faith strove against sickly, withering jealousy and both were blighted by it, times when he left everything for a day and rushed down to New York to counsel with the specialist who had been definitely established as physician to, not his body, but his heart.

"What is she doing round all these places? How does she get there?" These were stock queries of George's always.

"Nursing, maybe," soothed the doctor.

"Nursing? Fay! She doesn't know how to nurse. She's not—steady enough to nurse."

"Scrubbing, maybe. Roustabout work in hospitals."

George Judson smiled, a superior, half-ironic smile. His wife wouldn't nurse, she couldn't scrub, she couldn't do anything but play.

But the wise doctor smiled also, and not ironically, but hopefully. "It might be," he suggested, "that this play-girl is learning to work—is learning to organize her energies about something else than whims—that her will-life is conquering her impulse-life—that over yonder is