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makes strange bedfellows, and our young man, feeling that
he had something at stake in the matter—it usually struck
him as his reputation for ordinary witdevoted to his grace-
less charge an amount of attention of which note was duly
taken and which had at least the effect of keeping the poor
fellow alive. One of his lungs began to heal, the other prom-
ised to follow its example, and he was assured he might
outweather a dozen winters if he would betake himself to
those climates in which consumptives chiefly congregate.
As he had grown extremely fond of London, he cursed the
flatness of exile: but at the same time that he cursed he con-
formed, and gradually, when he found his sensitive organ
grateful even for grim favours, he conferred them with a
lighter hand. He wintered abroad, as the phrase is; basked
in the sun, stopped at home when the wind blew, went to
bed when it rained, and once or twice, when it had snowed
overnight, almost never got up again.
A secret hoard of indifference—like a thick cake a fond
old nurse might have slipped into his first school outfit—
came to his aid and helped to reconcile him to sacrifice;
since at the best he was too ill for aught but that arduous
game. As he said to himself, there was really nothing he
had wanted very much to do, so that he had at least not
renounced the field of valour. At present, however, the fra-
grance of forbidden fruit seemed occasionally to float past
him and remind him that the finest of pleasures is the rush
of action. Living as he now lived was like reading a good
book in a poor translation—a meagre entertainment for a
young man who felt that he might have been an excellent

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