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?"
I said not exactly an idiot. Yet your strong disinclination toward
marriage could certainly be traced to a shocked condition of the
nerves.
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