It caused him to immolate self, which is spiritually enlarging self.
In one respect Wilbur Edes was the biggest man in Fairbridge; in another, Doctor Sturtevant was.

Doctor Sturtevant depended upon no other person for his glory.

He shone as a fixed star, with his own lustre.

He was esteemed a very great physician indeed, and it was considered that Mrs.Sturtevant, who was good, and honest, and portly with a tight, middle-aged portliness, hardly lived up to her husband.
It was admitted that she tried, poor soul, but her limitations were held to be impossible, even by her faithful straining following of love.
When the splendid, florid Doctor, with his majestically curving expanse of waistcoat and his inscrutable face, whirred through the streets of Fairbridge in his motor car, with that meek bulk of womanhood beside him, many said quite openly how unfortunate it was that Doctor Sturtevant had married, when so young, a woman so manifestly his inferior.

They never failed to confer that faint praise, which is worse than none at all, upon the poor soul.
"She is a good woman," they said.