And I did not make the slightest effort to recover myself, to understand the strange phenomenon. I felt a repugnance for every kind of activity; I sought to keep myself in that sort of factitious apathy which covered the obscure development of all my preceding agitations; I avoided examining myself, in order not to awaken things that appeared dead, that seemed no longer to belong to my actual existence. I resembled those invalids who, having lost all sensibility in half of their body, imagine they have a corpse beside them.
But Federico came and knocked at my door. What news did he bring? His presence gave me a shock.
"We did not see one another yesterday evening," he said. "I came back rather late. How do you feel?"
"Neither well nor ill."
"You had a headache, they told me?"
"Yes, that is why I went to bed early."
"Ah! when shall we see the end of all our anxieties? You are not well, Juliana is still confined to her bed, and now mother is very much frightened because Raymond coughed during the night."
"He coughed?"
"Yes. No doubt it is only a slight cold; but mother exaggerates, as usual."
"Has the doctor been?"