“But don’t you want to get well?” asked the wide-eyed nurse.

“Certainly not!  I thought I was dead, and I was very happy.  I’ve been tricked and cheated and fooled,” and I dashed my fist against the counterpane.

“If you go on in this way,” said the nurse, “you will commit suicide.”

“I don’t care!” I cried—­and then, they tell me, fainted.  My temperature also ran up, and I became lightheaded again.  It was not until the next day that I recovered my sanity.  This time Lola was in the room with the nurse, and after a while the latter left us together.  Even Lola could not understand my paralysing dismay.

“But think of it, my dear friend,” she argued, “just think of it.  You are saved—­saved by a miracle.  The doctor says you will be stronger than you have ever been before.”

“All the more dreadful will it be,” said I.  “I had finished with life.  I had got through with it.  I don’t want a second lifetime.  One is quite enough for any sane human being.  Why on earth couldn’t they have let me die?”

Lola passed her cool hand over my forehead.

“You mustn’t talk like that—­Simon,” she said, in her deepest and most caressing voice, using my name somewhat hesitatingly, for the first time.  “You mustn’t.  A miracle really has been performed.  You’ve been raised from the dead—­like the man in the Gospel——­”

“Yes,” said I petulantly, “Lazarus.  And does the Gospel tell us what Lazarus really thought of the unwarrantable interference with his plans?  Of course he had to be polite—­”

“Oh, don’t!” cried, Lola, shocked.  In a queer unenlightened way, she was a religious woman.

“I’m sorry,” said I, feeling ashamed of myself.

“If you knew how I have prayed God to make you well,” she said.  “If I could have died for you, I would—­gladly—­gladly——­”

“But I wanted to die, my dear Lola,” I insisted, with the egotism of the sick.  “I object to this resuscitation.  I say it is monstrous that I should have to start a second lifetime at my age.  It’s all very well when you begin at the age of half a minute—­but when you begin at eight-and-thirty years——­”

“You have all the wisdom of eight-and-thirty years to start with.”

“There is only one thing more disastrous to a man than the wisdom of thirty-eight years,” I declared with mulish inconvincibility, “and that is the wisdom he may accumulate after that age.”

She sighed and abandoned the argument.  “We are going to make you well in spite of yourself,” she said.

They, namely, the doctor, the nurse, and Lola, have done their best, and they have succeeded.  But their task has been a hard one.  The patient’s will to live is always a great factor in his recovery.  My disgust at having to live has impeded my convalescence, and I fully believe that it is only Lola’s tears and the doctor’s frenzied appeals to me not to destroy the one chance of his life of establishing a brilliant professional reputation that have made me consent to face existence again.