“H’m,” said Sir Richmond.  “I think that is a fair description.  When she cares, that is.  When she is in good form.”

“Which she isn’t at present,” hazarded the doctor.  He exploded a mine of long-pent exasperation.

“She is the clumsiest hand at keeping well that I have ever known.  Health is a woman’s primary duty.  But she is incapable of the most elementary precautions.  She is maddeningly receptive to every infection.  At the present moment, when I am ill, when I am in urgent need of help and happiness, she has let that wretched child get measles and she herself won’t let me go near her because she has got something disfiguring, something nobody else could ever have or think of having, called carbuncle.  Carbuncle!”

“It is very painful,” said Dr. Martineau.  “No doubt it is,” said Sir Richmond.

“No doubt it is.”  His voice grew bitter.  He spoke with deliberation.  “A perfectly aimless, useless illness,—­and as painful as it can be.”

He spoke as if he slammed a door viciously.  And indeed he had slammed a door.  The doctor realized that for the present there was no more self-dissection to be got from Sir Richmond.

For some time Sir Richmond had been keeping the boat close up to the foaming weir to the left of the lock by an occasional stroke.  Now with a general air of departure he swung the boat round and began to row down stream towards the bridge and the Radiant Hotel.

“Time we had tea,” he said.

Section 6

After tea Dr. Martineau left Sir Richmond in a chair upon the lawn, brooding darkly—­apparently over the crime of the carbuncle.  The doctor went to his room, ostensibly to write a couple of letters and put on a dinner jacket, but really to make a few notes of the afternoon’s conversation and meditate over his impressions while they were fresh.

His room proffered a comfortable armchair and into this he sank...  A number of very discrepant things were busy in his mind.  He had experienced a disconcerting personal attack.  There was a whirl of active resentment in the confusion.

“Apologetics of a rake,” he tried presently.

“A common type, stripped of his intellectual dressing.  Every third manufacturer from the midlands or the north has some such undertow of ‘affairs.’  A physiological uneasiness, an imaginative laxity, the temptations of the trip to London—­weakness masquerading as a psychological necessity.  The Lady of the Carbuncle seems to have got rather a hold upon him.  She has kept him in order for three or four years.”

The doctor scrutinized his own remarks with a judicious expression.

“I am not being fair.  He ruffled me.  Even if it is true, as I said, that every third manufacturer from the midlands is in much the same case as he is, that does not dismiss the case.  It makes it a more important one, much more important:  it makes it a type case with the exceptional quality of being self-expressive.  Almost too selfexpressive.