help her brothers and sisters. She makes George a good wife and enjoys tactfully organizing his life.
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Their daughter, happy and healthy at first, suddenly turns sleepy and fretful. Dr. May rushes to see her, arriving in time to watch her die. It turns out that she has been "destroyed" by a popular preparation called Godfrey's cordial, administered freely by the nursemaid, who "had not known that the cordial was injurious, deeming it a panacea against fretfulness, precious to nurses, but against which ladies always had a prejudice, and, therefore, to be kept secret." The death has a shattering effect on the family. George, the father, reacts with anger, insisting that the police should be called and the nurse punished, and his insensitive raging adds to his wife's distress, so that Dr. May has to persuade him to leave her alone. Flora, the mother, reacts with bitter self-reproach, and when her husband declares that the nurse should be turned out of the house at once, she bursts out: "George, turn me out of the house too! If Preston killed her, I did!" and gives a "ghastly laugh.'' She is convinced that she is to blame for neglecting her child: she had devoted herself too wholeheartedly to her husband's career and to her own social success, leaving the baby too much to the care of the nurse:
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 | | I have never set my heart right. I am not like you nor my sisters. I have seemed to myself, and to you, to be trying to do right, but it was all hollow, for the sake of praise and credit. I know it, now it is too late; and He has let me destroy my child here, lest I should have destroyed her Everlasting Life, like my own.
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It is never quite clear how far Flora recovers from this despair. The one duty she throws herself into whole-heartedly is keeping her husband happy, in order to atone for the wrong she feels she has done him:
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| | For George her attention was always ready, and was perpetually claimed. He was forlorn and at a loss without her, every moment; and, in the sorrow which he too felt most acutely, could not have a minute's peace unless soothed by her presence.
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When the funeral takes place, Flora does all that is expected of her but does not derive from the ritual the comfort that it is designed to bring:
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| | The burial, however, failed to bring any peaceful comfort to the mourning mother. Meta's tears flowed freely, as much for her father as for her little niece;
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