The colour will fade out of bad
acts, Addison, but the colour of a good act is eternal. A noble deed will
never emulate a Sir Joshua Reynolds--never. Play to us, Cresswell."
"Yes, but I wish you to talk. I want to improvise to-night. The murmur of
your conversation will help me."
Julian sat down by the doctor. He, too, looked very happy. It was a
pleasant hour. Sympathy was in that pretty room, complete human sympathy,
and a sympathy that sprang from their vitality, avoiding the dusky
dumbness of the phlegmatic. Valentine sat down at the piano and began
gently to play. The smoke from the cigars curled away towards the
watching pictures; the room was full of soft music.
"Yes, Addison," Doctor Levillier continued, in a low voice, "I am
perpetually sitting with sorrow, communing with disease. That
consulting-room of mine is as a pool of Bethesda, only not all who come
to it, alas! can be healed. I sit day by day in my confessional--I like
to call it that; perhaps I was meant to be a priest--and I read the
stories of the lives of men and of women, most of them necessarily, from
the circumstances which bring them to me, sad. And yet I have a belief
in joy and its triumph which nothing can ever shake, a belief in the
final glory of good which nothing can ever conquer.
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