This was the kind of process Mr. Bernard had gone through.  First, the indignant surprise of a generous nature, when it comes unexpectedly into relations with a mean one.  Then the impulse of extermination,—­a divine instinct, intended to keep down vermin of all classes to their working averages in the economy of Nature.  Then a return of cheerful tolerance,—­a feeling, that, if the Deity could bear with rats and sharpers, he could; with a confident trust, that, in the long run, terriers and honest men would have the upperhand, and a grateful consciousness that he had been sent just at the right time to come between a patient victim and the master who held her in peonage.

Having once made up his mind what to do, Mr. Bernard was as good-natured and hopeful as ever.  He had the great advantage, from his professional training, of knowing how to recognize and deal with the nervous disturbances to which overtasked women are so liable.  He saw well enough that Helen Darley would certainly kill herself or lose her wits, if he could not lighten her labors and lift off a large part of her weight of cares.  The worst of it was, that she was one of those women who naturally overwork themselves, like those horses who will go at the top of their pace until they drop.  Such women are dreadfully unmanageable.  It is as hard reasoning with them as it would have been reasoning with Io, when she was flying over land and sea, driven by the sting of the never-sleeping gadfly.

This was a delicate, interesting game that he played.  Under one innocent pretext or another, he invaded this or that special province she had made her own.  He would collect the themes and have them all read and marked, answer all the puzzling questions in mathematics, make the other teachers come to him for directions, and in this way gradually took upon himself not only all the general superintendence that belonged to his office, but stole away so many of the special duties which might fairly have belonged to his assistant, that, before she knew it, she was looking better and feeling more cheerful than for many and many a month before.

When the nervous energy is depressed by any bodily cause, or exhausted by overworking, there follow effects which have often been misinterpreted by moralists, and especially by theologians.  The conscience itself becomes neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so that the least touch is agony.  Of all liars and false accusers, a sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable.  The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose life has been given to unselfish labors, who has filled a place which it seems to others only an angel would make good, reproaches herself with incompetence and neglect of duty.  The humble Christian, who has been a model to others, calls himself a worm of the dust on one page of his diary, and arraigns himself on the next for coming short of the perfection of an archangel.