Expectation Corner Emily Steele Elliott (1892)

CONFLICTING DUTIES
CHAPTER I.
“AND you see, my dear sir, I have so
many contending claims! Home calls and
charity calls, the family and the district.
You, who must know far better than I what
it is to be in the midst of conflicting duties,
will understand my difficulty in this
matter.”
The speaker was a middle-aged and
kindly-featured lady—hurried in manner
and voice, but conveying in her whole person
and speech an impression of benevolent
and capable, though possibly of diffuse,
activity. Her visit to Dr. Elwin’s
study on behalf of more than one family in
her district was at an end; and this was the
conclusion with which, gathering together
sundry letters and papers, she prepared to
say good-by.
A kindly smile was on the face of the
venerable pastor, who knew well how to
value Mrs. Stanton’s generous and truehearted
co-operation in parish interests; a
smile, however, which worked itself into
something like a visible note of inter-rogation
as her farewell observation fell on his
ear.
“Many claims, certainly; but I cannot,
say that the experience of conflicting duties
is one which I am prepared to recognize.
If you will pardon me for seeming
for a moment to differ from you I should
be inclined to dispose of the expression as
a contradiction in terms.”
No conflicting duties! If only Dr.
Elwin knew! If only he could see at that
moment on her writing-desk at home the
printed notice of the Zenana working-party,
the list of clothes needed for the children’s
summer wardrobes, the house-books
waiting to be made up, the half-finished
letter to Herbert at college, the jotteddown
notes for her mothers’-meeting
address on the following Monday, the
statement of cases for admission to the
Servants’ Home, the syllabus of the lecture
on electric light, to which it had been a
long promise that she should convey the
party from the schoolroom on the morrow,
her husband’s rough memoranda for circulars
of invitation to a drawing-room meeting
on the subject of African missionary
exploration, headings for an article in the
Sunday School Magazine! Should she return
to find these and sundry other documents
quickened into life, and engaged in
visible and rampant strife on the arena of
her Davenport, such strife would but be an
outward indication of the conflict of duties
which seemed to Mrs. Stanton to be
awaiting her equal and immediate attention.
“You are happy to be able so to dispose
of your claims, Dr. Elwin. I am
afraid I can hardly hope to do the same.”
“My dear friend,” was her host’s calm
reply, as, determinately not looking at his
watch in a stand on the table, or at the list
of engagements on his desk, or at the open
Hebrew Bible, with headings for the next
Sunday’s sermon marking the page, he
took up the question unexpectedly mooted,
“If I believed in the possibility of
‘conflicting duties,’ I should give up my
ministry as hopeless, and write underneath,
‘Let all things be done decently and in
order.’ Impossible! Believe me, whether
Solomon understood it or not, his prayer
concerning ‘the thing of a day in his day,
as the matter shall require,’ had in it the
very essence of New Testament life—the
life of childlike following and reception.
That, lived out, would effect a marvelous
transformation in many a course which
should exhibit, instead of a turmoil of so-
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