“I gets in such a muck o’ sweat, worrying about what’s going to come to them with me like this; it quite exhausts me, it does really. You wouldn’t believe how weak I was!”
And one could not help reminding him that he ought not to worry—it was very bad for him.
“Yes, I know that; I don’t think I can last long at this rate.”
“If you could give up worrying, you would get well much quicker!”
He answered by a look of such humble and unconscious irony as one may see on the faces of the dead before their last wonder at the end has faded from them.
“They tells me up at the hospital to eat well!”
And, looking at this meagre little man, it seemed that the advice was sound. Good food, and plenty of it!
“I’ve been doing the best I can, of course.” He made this statement without sarcasm, in a voice that seemed to say: “This world I live in is, of course, a funny world; the sort of fun it likes may be first-rate, but if I were once to begin to laugh at it, where could I stop—I ask you—where?”
“Plenty of milk they tell me is the best thing I can take, but the child she’s bound to have as much as we can manage to buy. At her age, you see, she needs it. Of course, if I could get a job!—I’d take anything—I’d drive a baker’s cart!”
He lifted his little pipes of arms, and let them fall again, and God knows what he meant by such a motion, unless it were to show his strength.