I sat staring over the garden. I wondered if, somewhere on the other
side of things, Great-Aunt Sophronisba wasn't snickering.
CHAPTER XX
HARBOR
"My faith, but I'm glad you're entirely well again, Sophy!" wrote
The Author, in his small, fine, hypercritical script. "You make the
world a pleasanter place by being alive in it. People like you
should inculcate in themselves the fixed and unalterable habit of
being alive. They should firmly refuse to be anything else. I call
this to your attention, in the hope that you will see your bounden
duty and do it.
"When I thought you were going to quit, I ran away. That was a
calamity I could not stand by and witness, without disaster.
However, Jelnik stayed!
"Your nurse (I do not like Miss Ransome, though I respect, admire,
and fear her. Her emotions are carbolized, her heart is sterilized,
her personality has the mathematical perfection of something turned
out by a super-machine: like, say, the last word in machine-guns.
None of the divine imperfection of your hand-wrought, artist-stuff
there! I forgive her for existing, because she is intelligent and
useful, two things that, without lying like a Christian and a
gentleman, one may not say of many women, and seldom of one woman at
the same time), your nurse gave me a highly interesting, impersonal,
scientific account of what happened after my flight.
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