With half ironic amusement the Sick Woman lay and watched his worried, fluctuating face.
"The question of climate is all arranged!" she said. "The speed that was stripped from my body last week, has at least been put back into my brain. Just where I am going, just whom I am going to take with me, just what I am going to do to amuse me, every last infinitesimal detail of all the rest of my life," she smiled, "I have planned it all out while you have been dawdling there between the wardrobe and the bureau."
"Dawdling?" snapped the Young Doctor. Quite abruptly he stopped his nervous pacing. "Well, where is it that you want to go?" he asked.
Musingly the woman's eyes stared off again into the window- framed vista of the city roofs.
"On an island," she said. "Off the coast of South Carolina there is a house. It is really rather a dreadful old place. I have not seen it since I was a girl. It was old then. It must be almost a wreck now. And the island is not very large. And there is no other house on the island. Just this great rambling deserted shack. And six battered old live-oak trees half strangled with dangly gray moss. And there are blue jays always in the gray 15moss, and cardinal birds, and unestimable squirrels. And there is a bedroom in the house forty feet long. And in that bedroom there is a four-poster seven feet wide, and most weirdly devised of old ships' figureheads, a smirking, faded siren at one corner, a broken-nosed sailor at another,—I forget the others—but altogether in memory I see it as a rather unusually broad and amusing shelf to be laid aside on. And there, in the middle of that great ship-figured bed, in the middle of that great dingy sunken-cabin sort of room with its every ancient windowpane blearing grayly into the sea, through deck-like porches so broad, so dark, so glowering that no streak of cloud or sky will ever reach my eyes again, nor any strip of gray-brown earth—I shall lie, I say, in unutterable peace and tranquillity as other ghosts have lain before me, 'forty fathoms deep' below all their troubles. And always as I lie thus, there will be the sigh of the surf in my ears. And the swell of the tide in my eyes. Eternally across my windows fin-like wings shall soar and pass and gray mosses float and flare."
"Cheerful!" snapped the Young Doctor. 16
"Yes. Isn't it?" beamed the woman.
With a gasp of surprise the Young Doctor turned and stared at her.
"Why, I really believe that you think so!" he stammered.
"Why, of course I think so!" said the Woman. "Why not?" she queried. "A dimming candle glows brightest in a dark room!" Not a trace of morbidness was in her voice, not a flicker of sentimentality. "And besides," she smiled. "It is also my desire to remove myself as far as possible from the main thoroughfares of life."