“Gretchen, in a way this is a terrible story,” I said. “Why, as a good Catholic girl couldn’t you have seen your musical talent as a gift from God, a gift not to be wasted?”

“It was from God, I knew it was. But don’t you see? There was a fork in the road; the sacrifice of the piano was the opportunity that God gave me to serve Him in a special way. Lestat, what could the music have meant compared to the act of helping people, hundreds of people?”

I shook my head. “I think the music can be seen as equally important.”

She thought for a long while before she answered. “I couldn’t continue with it,” she said. “Perhaps I used the crisis of my mother’s illness, I don’t know. I had to become a nurse. There was no other way for me. The simple truth is—I cannot live when I am faced with the misery in the world. I cannot justify comfort or pleasure when other people are suffering. I don’t know how anyone can.”

“Surely you don’t think you can change it all, Gretchen.”

“No, but I can spend my life affecting many, many individual lives. That’s what counts.”

This story so upset me that I couldn’t remain seated there. I stood up, stretching my stiff legs, and I went to the window and looked out at the field of snow.

It would have been easy to dismiss it had she been a sorrowful or mentally crippled person, or a person of dire conflict and instability. But nothing seemed farther from the truth. I found her almost unfathomable.

She was as alien to me as my mortal friend Nicolas had been so many, many decades ago, not because she was like him. But because his cynicism and sneering and eternal rebellion had contained an abnegation of self which I couldn’t really understand. My Nicki—so full of seeming eccentricity and excess, yet deriving satisfaction from what he did only because it pricked others.

Abnegation of self—that was the heart of it.

I turned around. She was merely watching me. I had the distinct feeling again that it didn’t matter much to her what I said. She didn’t require my understanding. In a way, she was one of the strongest people I’d encountered in all my long life.

It was no wonder she took me out of the hospital; another nurse might not have assumed such a burden at all.

“Gretchen,” I asked, “you’re never afraid that your life has been wasted—that sickness and suffering will simply go on long after you’ve left the earth, and what you’ve done will mean nothing in the larger scheme?”

“Lestat,” she said, “it is the larger scheme which means nothing.” Her eyes were wide and clear. “It is the small act which means all. Of course sickness and suffering will continue after I’m gone. But what’s important is that I have done all I can. That’s my triumph, and my vanity. That’s my vocation and my sin of pride. That is my brand of heroism.”