"No, my dear lady, there is nothing dreadful in a tired heart; but I don't want you to faint without anybody at hand to look after you."
Vera assured him that she was not likely to faint, and made mock of his care.
He had been very insistent upon certain points in his treatment, which he arranged with the general practitioner who had attended her for minor ailments in earlier days, when she was rarely in need of medical care. He would not allow her to go up and down stairs any longer. That ordeal must be at an end until she was stronger. He had the dining-room made into a bedroom for her use. All the gloomy old pictures and colossal furniture had been removed, and the walls were hung with delicate chintz, while the choicest things in her rooms upstairs had been brought down to make this ground-floor apartment pleasant for her—a room that smiled as it had never smiled before, even on those gala nights when a flood of light shone upon the splendour of Georgian silver, and Venetian glass, and diamonds, and fashionable women.
"You are taking far too much trouble about me," Vera said, when first she saw this transformation.
"We only want to save you trouble. The ascent to the second floor of this lofty house is almost Alpine. I wonder you never established an electric lift."
"I never minded running up and down stairs."
She remembered the first years after her second marriage, the years of trivial pleasures and hurry and excitement, and with how light a step she had gone up and down that stately staircase, to give herself over to her Parisian maid, and to have her smart toilet of the morning changed for the still smarter clothes of the afternoon, while she submitted impatiently, with a mind full of worthless things: the fashion of her gown, the shape of her last new hat. That rush from one amusement to another—endless hours without pause—had been like the morphia maniac's needle. It had killed thought.
All that was left of life now was thought, or rather memory; for of late thought and memory were one.
Her doctors might do what they liked with her, so long as they let her stay in the silent house, and did not take away her dog.