"Come in! Come on! Well, don't you hear? Can't you understand any—Oh, it's you, child. I thought it was one of those darned waiters.
"Sit down; pull up a chair by the bed. It's so long since I sent for you that I just about thought that you were not coming. I suppose you were surprised at my sending for you; but it was the only way to do. It's a hard thing to break to you, Yvonne; but you'd have to know in the course of the day, and I always do everything right off that I've not decided to wait and see about. Now don't look frightened, my dear; nobody's dead—it's only that I'm paralyzed!
"There, what do you think of that? Yes, it's true for a fact. My legs! I had some premonitory symptoms yesterday going up that cursed old tower, and I had some very advanced ones coming down from it; and this morning, when I started to shave, the truth just burst in my face. Now, don't try to say anything, for I've read too many patent-medicine advertisements not to recognize paralysis when I feel it up and down the back of my own legs. I'm not the man not to know my own feelings, and I want to tell you that when I got up this morning I couldn't stand up, and then, after I stood up, I couldn't sit down; and if that isn't a clear case of having completely given out, I don't know what you would call it.
"Now, my dear, the question is, what's to be done? Of course our travels have come to a full stop, for I shall probably never walk again. The curious thing is that I don't feel any particular inclination ever to walk again. You've no conception of the sentiments that I feel in my legs; but if you roll the fatigue of a lifetime into either the left or the right, you can get some faint inkling of the first freshness of paralysis. I tell you, Yvonne, it is awful. Every cobblestone I've gone over seems to be singing in my calves; but that's neither here nor there. What I want you to do is to go to the pocket of my valise get out the cable-code book and look out a word that means 'Both legs paralyzed. What shall I do with the girls?' You'll find a word that means it, if you look long enough. They've got forty pages of words that mean every fool thing on earth from 'It's a boy' to 'Impossible to lend you ten dollars.' I was reading it over in Paris the other day while I waited for my money at the bank.
"Well, ain't you going to get the code-book? I don't want to be impatient, but I want some one to be doing something. You don't know how restless it makes me to think of lying still for the rest of my life. While I was waiting for you, I was thinking that probably I shall live right here in Caen till I die. I'm very glad we got here too late to see anything, because now I can take it bit by bit and drag it out through my remaining days. I shall have a wheeling-chair and a man to push me around, and—well, maybe it's in the little outside pocket. I know I had it in Paris, anyhow; I remember I was just reading that 'salsify' means 'Your mother-in-law left by the ten o'clock train,' and that 'salsifry' means that she didn't, when they brought me my money, and I was free to go.
"'I'm happy that it will be out of the question for me ever to travel again.'"