A Singular Life by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

The real crises of life are those that the stories leave untold. It is not the sudden blow, but the learning how to bear the bruise afterwards, that constitutes experience; not the delirium of fever, but the weariness of convalescence. What does one do the Monday morning after the funeral? How does one meet the grocery bills when the property is gone? How does a man act when his reputation is ruined by the span of an afternoon? Fiction does not tell us, but fact omits nothing of the grim details; spares not the least stroke of that black perplexity which, next to the insecurity of life, is the hardest thing about it.

You men of affairs, give a moment's manly sympathy to the position of a young fellow like yourselves, halting just over the line between education and a life's work, trained for a calling which the worldliest soul among you respects as nobler and higher than your own, tripped at the outset by one of its lower and more ignoble accidents; a man who will not lie to God or his own soul, who has scorned the consequences of being simply true, but must bear them for all that, like other men. For the holiest dedications in this world suffer the taint thereof; and it is at once the saddest and the healthiest thing about the work of a man of God that it is subject to market laws, to fashion, to prejudice, to envy, and to poor judgment, like other work.