To continue. Your Aunt Caroline does not believe in rest cures anyway. She thinks poultices are much more effective. It stands to reason that if a thing is in, it ought to come out. Rest cures are just laziness. But, thank goodness, she never expected anything from the Spence family but laziness. And she had told her sister so before she married into it....
Allow an hour here for ancestral history with appropriate comment and another hour for a brief review of your own conduct from youth up and we come within measurable distance of a few words by me. I took up the point of the four or five nice girls who had been invited to visit. I put the whole thing down to shock and pointed out that patience is required. A return to physical normality, I said, would doubtless bring with it a reviving interest in the sex. It was indeed very fortunate, I told her, that you were, at present, indifferent. Any question of selecting a life partner in your present nervous state would be most dangerous. Your power of judgment, I pointed out, was temporarily jarred and out of gear. You might marry anybody. The only safe, the only humane way, was to give you time to recover yourself.
"Power of judgment!" said Aunt Caroline. "Do you mean to tell me that my sister's son is in danger of becoming an idiot?"
I said not exactly an idiot. Yet your strong disinclination toward marriage could certainly be traced to a shocked condition of the nerves. Certain fixed ideas—
"Fixed ideas!" said your Aunt. She has a particularly annoying habit of repeating one's words. "Benis has always had fixed ideas—though when he was young," she added with satisfaction, "I knew how to unfix them. If this absurd rest cure can do anything to cure chronic stubbornness, I've nothing to say. Why, even his father was easier to manage."
"Benis," I said, "considers himself very like his father."
"Does he?" retorted your dear Aunt with withering scorn. "He is just as much like his father as a lemon is like a lobster."
This ended our conversation. But the effect of it is still with me. Last night I dreamed of lemons and today I prescribed lobster for a man with acute dyspepsia. I tell you what, you old shirker, it's up to you to come home and bear your own Aunt. I'm through. Bones.
P.S. The office nurse has been changed since you left. I have now Miss Watkins, returned from overseas. I think you knew her—name of Mary? Very good looking—almost her only fault.
P.P.S. What you say about your pleasant old gentle-man with the umbrella sounds very much like masked epilepsy. Ought to be under treatment. I should say dangerous.