Indeed, she belonged assuredly to that purely feminine order of things which gains perhaps its best strength through obedience.

Give Elmira a power over her, and she would never quite fall.
Elmira went about getting dinner, tiptoeing around her mother, who still sat sunken in her strange apathy of melancholy or exhaustion, it was difficult to tell which, while Jerome spaded and dug in the garden, in the fury of zeal which he had inherited from her.
Elmira had dinner ready early, and called Jerome.

When he went in he found her trying to induce her mother to swallow a bowl of gruel.
"Won't you take it, mother ?" she was pleading, with tears in her eyes; but her mother only lifted one hand feebly and motioned it away; she would not raise her head or open her eyes.
"Give me that bowl," said Jerome.

He held it before his mother, and slipped one hand behind her neck, constraining her gently to raise her head.

"Here, mother," said he, "here's your gruel." She resisted faintly, and shook her weak, repelling hand again.