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‘”Father!” said young Dr. Ralph Dexter to the old doctor in The Spinner in the Sun, “father! it may be because I’m young, but I hold before me, very strongly, the ideals of our profession. It seems to me a very beautiful and wonderful life that is opening up before me, always to help, to give, to heal. I feel as though I had been dedicated to some sacred calling, some lifelong service. And service means brotherhood.”

‘” You’ll get over that! ” returned the old doctor curtly, yet not without a certain secret admiration. ” You’ll get over that when you’ve had to engage a lawyer to collect your modest wages for your uplifting work, the healed not being sufficiently grateful to pay the healer. When you’ve gone ten miles in the dead of winter, at midnight, to take a pin out of a squalling baby’s back, why, you may change your mind!”‘

And later on in the same story Myrtle Reed gives us another dialogue between the two doctors.

‘”I may be wrong,” remarked Ralph, “but I’ve always believed that nothing is so bad that it can’t be made better.”

‘”The unfailing earmark of youth,” the old man replies; ” you’ll get over that! “‘

Old Dr. Dexter is quite right. Good or bad, the tendency is to get over things. Many a man has entered his business or profession with the highest and most roseate ideals, and the tragedy of his life lay in the fact that he recovered from them.

Yes, there is nothing that we cannot get over. Our recuperative faculties know no limit. None of our diseases are incurable. I knew an old lady who really thought that her malady was fatal. She fancied that she could never recover. She even told me that the doctor had informed her that her case was hopeless. She lay back upon her pillow, and her snowy hair shamed the whiteness about her. ‘I shall never get over it,’ she sighed, ‘ I shall never get over it!‘ But she did. We sang ‘Rock of Ages’ beside her sunlit grave this afternoon.