grand humility
merely perplexed her; it was at present far beyond her comprehension.
While his willingness to serve every one, even in the most trifling and
petty concerns of daily life, she often attributed to mere good nature.
Grand acts of self-sacrifice she admired enthusiastically, but the more
really difficult round of small denials and trifling services she did
not in the least appreciate. Absorbed in the contemplation, as it were,
of the Hamlets in life, she had no leisure to spare for the Horatios.

She proved a capital patient; her whole mind was set on getting well,
and her steady common sense and obedience to rules made her a great
favorite with her elder doctor. Really healthy, and only invalided by
the hard work and trouble she had undergone, seven or eight months' rest
did wonders for her. In the enforced quiet, too, she found plenty
of time for study. Charles Osmond had never had a better pupil. They
learned to know each other very well during those lessons, and many
were the perplexing questions which Erica started. But they were not as
before, a mere repetition of the difficulties she had been primed with
at her father's lecture hall, nor did she bring them forward with the
triumphant conviction that they were unanswerable. They were real,
honest questions, desiring and seeking everywhere for the true answer
which might be somewhere.

The result of her study of the life of Christ was at first to make her a
much better secularist. She found to her surprise that there was much in
His teaching that entirely harmonized with secularism; that, in fact, He
spoke a great deal about the improvement of this world, and scarcely at
all about that place in the clouds of which Christians made so much.
By the end of a year she had also reached the conviction that, whatever
interpolations there might be in the gospels, no untrue writer, no
admiring but dishonest narrator COULD have conceived such a character as
that of Christ. For she had dug down to the very root of the matter. She
had left for the present the, to her, perplexing and almost irritating
catalogue of miracles, and had begun to perceive the strength and
indomitable courage, the grand self-devotion, the all-embracing love of
the man. Very superficial had been her former view. He had been to her
a shadowy, unreal being, soft and gentle, even a little effeminate,
speaking sometimes what seemed to her narrow words about only saving the
lost sheep of the hou