“I haven’t travelled much.  Last autumn I was in Iceland for a few weeks; would you care to hear of that?”

“Very much.  Just talk as if you were going over it in your memory.  Don’t mind if I close my eyes; I shan’t be asleep; it helps me to imagine, that’s all.”

Mrs. Travis did as she was asked.  Now and then Madeline put a question.  When at length there came a pause, she said abruptly: 

“I suppose it seems dreadful to you, to see me lying here like this?”

“It makes me wish I had it in my power to relieve you.”

“But does it seem dreadful?  Could you bear to imagine yourself in the same case?  I want you to tell me truthfully.  I’m not an uneducated girl, you know; I can think about life and death as people do nowadays.”

Mrs. Travis looked at her curiously.

“I can imagine positions far worse,” she answered.

“That means, of course, that you could not bear to picture yourself in this.  But it’s strange how one can get used to it.  The first year I suffered horribly—­in mind, I mean.  But then I still had hope.  I have none now, and that keeps my mind calmer.  A paradox, isn’t it?  It’s always possible, you know, that I may feel such a life unendurable at last, and then I should hope to find a means of bringing it to an end.  For instance, if we become so poor that I am too great a burden.  Of course I wouldn’t live in a hospital.  I don’t mean I should be too proud, but the atmosphere would be intolerable.  And one really needn’t live, after one has decided that it’s no use.”

“I don’t know what to say about that,” murmured Mrs. Travis.

“No; you haven’t had the opportunity of thinking it over, as I have.  I can imagine myself reaching the point when I should not care to have health again, even if it were offered me.  I haven’t come to that yet; oh no!  To-night I am feeling dreadfully what I have lost—­not like I used to, but still dreadfully.  Will you tell me something about yourself?  What kind of books do you like?”

“Pretty much the same as you do, I should fancy.  I like to know what new things people are discovering, and how the world looks to clever men.  But I can’t study; I have no perseverance.  I read the reviews a good deal.”

“You’d never guess the last book I have read.  It lies on the chest of drawers there—­a treatise on all the various kinds of paralysis.  The word ‘paralysis’ used to have the most awful sound to me; now I’m so familiar with it that it has ceased to be shocking and become interesting.  What I am suffering from is called paraplegia; that’s when the lower half of the body is affected; it comes from injury or disease of the spinal cord.  The paralysis begins at the point in the vertebral column where the injury was received.  But it tends to spread upward.  If it gets as far as certain nerves upon which the movements of the diaphragm depend, then you die.  I wonder whether that will be my case?”