'I heard the news early. I am come to stay with him, till—the last....'
We looked at each other some time—eye to eye, steadily, she and I: but mine dropped before Clodagh's. A word was on my mouth to say, but I said nothing.
The recovery of Peters was not so steady as I had expected. At the end of the first week he was still prostrate. It was then that I said to Clodagh:
'Clodagh, your presence at the bed-side here somehow does not please me. It is so unnecessary.'
'Unnecessary certainly,' she replied: 'but I always had a genius for nursing, and a passion for watching the battles of the body. Since no one objects, why should you?'
'Ah!... I don't know. This is a case that I dislike. I have half a mind to throw it to the devil.'
'Then do so.'
'And you, too—go home, go home, Clodagh!'
'But why?—if one does no harm. In these days of "the corruption of the upper classes," and Roman decadence of everything, shouldn't every innocent whim be encouraged by you upright ones who strive against the tide? Whims are the brakes of crimes: and this is mine. I find a sensuous pleasure, almost a sensual, in dabbling in delicate drugs—like Helen, for that matter, and Medea, and Calypso, and the great antique women, who were all excellent chymists. To study the human ship in a gale, and the slow drama of its foundering—isn't that a quite thrilling distraction? And I want you to get into the habit at once of letting me have my little way——'
Now she touched my hair with a lofty playfulness that soothed me: but even then I looked upon the rumpled bed, and saw that the man there was really very sick.