"But she ought to try. The Princess Hermione has been perfectly sweet about her."
"Vera doesn't care. That's her worst symptom, that I know of. She has left off caring about things."
"And that is a very bad symptom," said Lady Okehampton. "When Chagford's wife showed signs of it, I bundled her off to a nursing home for six weeks, and she came out of it just in time for Ascot, and as keen as mustard, as Chagford said in his vulgar way. She had been dieted, and massaged, and not allowed to see anyone but her nurses; and she was quite cured of not caring. She romped with her children, and ate jam pudding like one of them."
"Ah, you see there were children," sighed Claude. "There was something for her to come back to."
"Vera and you ought to have had a family. It is very disappointing," said Aunt Mildred, and the tone implied that when she said "disappointing" she meant "reprehensible."
"Never mind," she went on presently, in a more hopeful tone, "don't be down-hearted, Claude. If doctors can cure her, she shall be another woman before the end of the year."
"You love doctors much better than I do," said Claude, grasping her hands. "Find the man who can cure her and I will worship him."
After this Vera entered upon a wide acquaintance with the fashionable specialists: the man who was invincible in treatment of lung trouble; the only authority upon cardiac disorders; the man who knew more about the nervous system than any other physician in Europe; the man who had given his life to the study of the digestive organs; the hypnotic doctor, and the mesmerist; and finally, as a condescension, the all-round or common-sense man who might be consulted about anything, and sometimes, as it were by rule of thumb, succeeded where the specialists had failed.
These gentlemen came to Portland Place at irregular intervals through the month of August, Vera resolutely refusing to leave London in that impossible month, and Lady Okehampton again sacrificing her annual cure to the care of her niece, as she had done in the year of Mario Provana's unhappy death.