I ventured to put a part of the vagary to the acid test: 

“Alicia, I wasn’t thrown out again, into water, was I?”

“No.  That was delirium, dear.  You were frightfully ill for a while, Sophy.”  Her face paled.  “So ill that The Author fled, because he wouldn’t stay in the house and see—­what we expected to see.  He said it would permanently shatter his nerves.  But he has wired every day since.”

“It was sensible of him to go.  And it’s kind of him to wire.”  I said no more about the water.

“Everybody has been kind.  And it wasn’t duty kindness, either.  It was kind kindness!” said Alicia, lucidly.  “Do you know what they’re saying in Hyndsville now?  They’re saying old Sophronisba played a joke on herself.”  She left me to digest that as best I might.

It isn’t pleasant to be ill anywhere.  But it isn’t altogether unpleasant to be on the sick list in South Carolina.  Everybody is anxious about you.  Old ladies with palm-leaf fans in their tireless hands come and sit with you.  They aren’t brilliant old ladies, you understand.  I know some whose secular library consists of the Complete Works of John Esten Cooke, Gilmore Simms’s War Poems of the South, and a thumbed copy of Father Ryan.  But add to these the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Imitation of Christ, and it doesn’t make such a bad showing.  It’s astonishing how soothing the companionship of women fed upon this pabulum can be, when the things of the world are of necessity set aside for a space, and the simpler things of the spirit draw near.

Old gentlemen in well-brushed clothes and immaculate, exquisitely darned linen, call daily with small gifts of fruit and flowers, and send you messages from which you infer that the sun won’t be able to shine properly until you come outside again.  And there isn’t a housekeeper of your acquaintance who hasn’t got you on her mind:  there are sent to you steaming bowls of perfect soup, flaky rolls and golden cake, jeweled jellies, and cool, enticing, trembly things in glass dishes.  And when you can sit up for more than an hour or two at a time, why, then you know what it really means to have South Carolina neighbors.

Doctor Geddes made me spend my days in the garden that Schmetz had labored upon with such loving-kindness, and that in consequence was become a marvel of bloom and scent.  Every butterfly in South Carolina must have visited that garden.  I hadn’t known there were that many butterflies in the world.  All the florist-shop windows in New York, that I had once paused before with envy and longing, were stinted and poor and pale before the living, out-o’-doors wonder of it.  Florist shops haven’t any bees, nor birds, nor butterflies, nor trees that wave their green branches at you like friendly hands.

A flowering vine festooned the marble Love, and one great scarlet spray of bloom flamed upon his marble torch, “so lyrically,” Miss Martha Hopkins said, that she was moved to write a poem about it.  I thought it a very nice poem, and I said so, when she read it to us.  But Doctor Geddes, who doesn’t care for poetry, except Robert Burns’s, rubbed his nose.