Now here is a sporting offer.  If you’ll drop it and come home at once I’ll promise never to tell Aunt Caroline.  Come the moment you can put foot to the ground.  And, until then, I recommend strict seclusion and no nursing.  Nursing might well be fatal.  Stick to Li Ho.  He is your only chance.

Your Aunt Caroline sends her love. (I told her I was writing you directions for further treatment).  She feels the deprivation of your letters keenly.  She can’t see why the writing of a nice, chatty letter to one’s only living Aunt should prove an undue drain upon nervous energy.  Life has taught her not to expect consideration from relatives, but it does seem hard that her only sister’s boy should treat her as if she were the scarlet fever.  To allow himself to be ordered away from home for a rest cure was certainly less than courteous.  To anyone not understanding the situation it would almost imply that his home was not restful.  And after all the trouble she had taken even to the extent of strained relations with those Macfarland people who own a rooster.  If the slight had been aimed entirely at herself she could have taken it silently, but when it included the three or four charming girls whom she had asked to visit (one at a time) for the purpose of providing pleasant company, she felt obliged to protest.  Although protest, she knew, was useless.  All this, however, she could have borne.  The thing that she could scarcely forgive was the slight offered to his native town by a departure three days before the set date, thereby turning his “going away” tea into a “gone away”—­an action considered by all (invited) Bainbridge as a personal insult.

Pause here for breath.

To continue.  Your Aunt Caroline does not believe in rest cures anyway.  She thinks poultices are much more effective.  It stands to reason that if a thing is in, it ought to come out.  Rest cures are just laziness.  But, thank goodness, she never expected anything from the Spence family but laziness.  And she had told her sister so before she married into it. ...

Allow an hour here for ancestral history with appropriate comment and another hour for a brief review of your own conduct from youth up and we come within measurable distance of a few words by me.  I took up the point of the four or five nice girls who had been invited to visit.  I put the whole thing down to shock and pointed out that patience is required.  A return to physical normality, I said, would doubtless bring with it a reviving interest in the sex.  It was indeed very fortunate, I told her, that you were, at present, indifferent.  Any question of selecting a life partner in your present nervous state would be most dangerous.  Your power of judgment, I pointed out, was temporarily jarred and out of gear.  You might marry anybody.  The only safe, the only humane way, was to give you time to recover yourself.

“Power of judgment!” said Aunt Caroline.  “Do you mean to tell me that my sister’s son is in danger of becoming an idiot?”