In the morning word came down from her chamber that she was unable to get up. Every attention and every sympathy was shown her, and after a day or two Doctor Towns, finding himself baffled to discover disease of any kind, sent for another physician. The other physician was equally unsuccessful. The simple fact was that the young woman could not get out of her bed. Why she could not get out of her bed was a problem that the medical men were wholly unable to solve. The young woman’s appetite was excellent, and all her functions seemed to be in an entirely normal condition.
Nevertheless, she could not get up.
Week after week she lay there, attentively waited upon by the servants, assiduously visited by the family, sympathetically condoled with by friends, but still utterly unable to arise from her bed. Her salary was continued all the while, of course.
The servants at last became suspicious.
To their minds it seemed incredible that she should live so long and so comfortably without exercise. They suspected that she got up in the night and walked the floor. To test this they gently sprinkled her floor with pulverized starch while she slept, and then turned out the lights. But weeks of experimentation of this character utterly failed to reveal that the young woman ever got out of her bed.
She read the newspapers with great diligence every day, and she read all the new books that came out, for they all came to Doctor Towns’s household.
She even wrote now and then, lying there in bed, for newspapers and magazines with which she had established connections. She was a brilliant woman, and her matter was acceptable in the market.
She lay thus, for eighteen months. Then came secession.
The newspapers were filled with it. When at last war became an obvious fact, and escape from the South to any Northern person disinclined to Southern policies was manifestly a matter of but a few days, Miss R—— suddenly, I may almost say miraculously, recovered. She got up one morning and packed her trunks before six o’clock. At seven, when the family breakfast was served, she appeared in the dining-room, and calmly asked: “Will you kindly send me to the railroad station, Doctor Towns? I’m going North to-day.”
No explanation was ever asked or ever given.