"From which you recover to despise yourself?"
She seemed to add this to his sentence.
Lawrence rose; he stood a moment in front of his wife, gazing down at her. He was bewildered by the tumult of his emotions, by his strange indifference to Prudence, and, perhaps more than all, by his physical weakness.
He turned towards the couch near and stretched himself out upon it. His wife rose and put a shawl over him, and he said, "Thank you," in a mechanical way. Then he asked, trying to prevent his voice from showing irritation:
"Is it really necessary for us to continue this talk?"
"Perhaps not; but if I prefer to go on, dear Rodney?"
Lawrence closed his eyes.
"Go on," he said.
"How kind of you to let me have the last word! But you see I think I'll take up the study of psychology, with you and me as object-lessons. Can't we mount a scrap of our feelings on a bit of glass and put it under that microscope of yours? Really, I didn't think I should come to look back almost with envy to that time when I nursed mamma at Carlsbad. At least I wasn't married then, and Lord Maxwell came to the place. To be sure, he had symptoms, and a man with symptoms isn't much better than a block of wood to flirt with."
Prudence's voice was running on with a semblance of gaiety; and now she laughed.