Our Nervous Friends | Page 2

revealing the best of its beauties. It was a
home from which emanated an atmosphere of peace and repose which
one seemed to feel even as one approached. It was a home pervaded
with the breath of happiness, a home which none entered without
benefit.
The husband, Martin Lord, was an expert chemist who had long been in
the service of the Government. Capable, worthy, manly, he was blest in
what he was, and in what he had. They had been married eight years,
and the slipping away of the first child, Margaret, was the only sadness
which had paused at their door. Mrs. Lord had been Ethel Baxter for
thirty years. Her father was an intense, high-strung business man, an
importer, who spent much time in Europe where he died of an
American-contracted typhoid-fever, when Ethel was ten. Her mother
was one of a large well-known Maryland family, fair, brown-eyed too,
and frail; also, by all the rights of inheritance, training and development,
sensitive and nervous. In her family the precedents of blue blood were
religiously maintained with so much emphasis on the "blue" that no
beginning was ever made in training her into a protective robustness.
So, in spite of elaborate preparation and noted New York skill and the

highest grade of conscientious nursing, she recovered poorly after
Ethel's birth. Strength, even such as she formerly had, did not return.
She didn't want to be an invalid. She was devoted to her husband and
eager to companion and mother her child. The surgeons thought her
recovery lay in their skill, and in ten years one operated twice, and two
others operated once each, but for some reason the scalpel's edge did
not reach the weakness. Then Mr. Baxter died, and all of her physical
discomforts seemed intensified until, in desperation, the fifth operation
was undertaken, which was long and severe, and from which she failed
to react. So Ethel was an orphan at eleven, though not alone, for the
good uncle, her mother's brother, took her to his home and never failed
to respond to any impulse through which he felt he could fulfil the
fatherhood and motherhood which he had assumed. Absolutely devoted,
affectionate, emotional, he planned impulsively, he gave freely, but he
knew not law nor order in his own high-keyed life; so neither law nor
order entered into the training of his ward.
Ethel Baxter's childhood had been remarkably well influenced,
considering the nervous intensity of both parents. For the mother's sake,
their winters had been spent in Florida, their summers on Long Island.
Her mother, in face of the fact that she rarely knew a day of physical
comfort and for years had not felt the thrill of physical strength, most
conscientiously gave time, thought and prayer to her child's rearing.
Hours were devoted to daily lessons, and many habits of consideration
and refinement, many ideals of beauty, many niceties of domestic duty
and practically all her studies, were mother-taught. Ethel was active,
physically restless, impulsive, cheerful, fairly intense in her eagerness
for an expression of the thrilling activities within. She was truly a
high-type product of generations of fine living, and her blue blood did
show from the first in the rapid development of keenness of mind and
acuteness of feeling. Typically of the nervous temperament, she early
showed a superb capacity for complex adjustments. Yet, with one
damaging, and later threatening idea, the mother infected the child's
mind; the conception of invalidism entered into the constructive fabric
of the child-thought all the more deeply, because there was little of
offensively selfish invalidism ever displayed by the mother. But many
of the concessions and considerations instinctively demanded by the

nervous sufferer were for years matters-of-course in the Baxter home;
and these demands, almost unconsciously made by the mother, could
but modify much of the natural expression of her child's young years.
Another damaging attitude-reaction, intense in its expression, followed
the unexpected death of Ethel's father. The mother, true to the ancient
and honorable precedents of her family, went into a month of
helplessness following the sad news. She could not attend the funeral,
and for weeks the activities of the household were muffled by
mourning; when she left her room, it was to wear the deepest crepe,
while a half-inch of deadest black bordered the hundreds of responses
which she personally sent to notes of condolence. She never spoke
again of her husband without reference to her bereavement. Then, a
year later, when the mother herself suddenly went, it seemed to devolve
on the child to fulfil the mother's teachings. Her uncle's attitude,
moreover, toward his sister's death was in many ways unhappy, for he
did not repress expressions of bitterness toward the surgeons and
condemned the fate which had so early robbed Ethel of