“You’ll have to get up some time or other,” he said. “You may just as well start to-day.”
When he had left the room I appealed to the nurse.
“Did you ever,” I said, “hear a more inane remark than that? In the first place I have pretty well made up my mind never to get up again. It isn’t worth while for all the good I ever get by being up. In the second place it’s ridiculous to say that because one has to do a thing sometime one may as well do it at once. You have to be buried sometime, but you wouldn’t like it if McMeekin told you that you might just as well be buried to-day.”
I hold that this was a perfectly sound argument which knocked the bottom out of McMeekin’s absurd statement, but it did not convince the nurse. As I might have known beforehand she was in league with McMeekin. Instead of agreeing with me that the man was a fool, she smiled at me in that particularly trying way called bright and cheery.
“But wouldn’t it be nice to sit up for a little?” she said.
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“It would be a change for you, and you’d sleep better afterward.”
“I’ve got on capitally without sleep for nearly a week and I don’t see any use in reacquiring a habit, a wasteful habit, which I’ve succeeded in breaking.”
She said something about the doctor’s orders.
“The doctor,” I replied, “did not give any orders. He gave permission, which is a very different thing.”