Una cosa es ser tentado, Escalus, y otra muy distinta caer.
Lydgate certainly had good reason to reflect on the service his practice did him in counteracting his personal cares.
He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients, the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself.
It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly—it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another’s need and trial.
Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers.
Some of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under his anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy.
La sospecha del señor Farebrother respecto al opiáceo era cierta, sin embargo. Bajo la primera y mortificante presión de las dificultades previstas, y la primera percepción de que su matrimonio, si no quería ser una soledad yugada, debía ser un estado de esfuerzo por seguir amando sin preocuparse demasiado por ser amado, había probado una o dos veces una dosis de opio.