"Oh, I daresay I can find time to sit with her, now and then, if that's all you want me to do," he acquiesced, looking down his nose.
"She seems really sadly," Lucilla told him. "Her head is bad, and her nerves—she's all nerves! Then, she has a sort of seizure, now and then——"
"Heavens!"
"Yes. She suddenly becomes, she says, rigid. Can't move hand or foot."
"I say, that must be bad. And what do we do then, Luce?"
"Well," said Lucilla, calmly surveying herself in the glass, and turning her long neck to get a view of her elegant back, "in that case you will have to carry her up to bed, and I shall have to undress her and send for the doctor."
"I carry her!" he said to himself, doubtfully, again and again as he dressed. "She's something of a lump for any man to carry."
He was considered a handsome man by himself and his friends; by no one could he be considered a fine one. Lucilla—he admired her long, graceful figure still—was as tall as he, and he knew himself lacking in muscular strength. "I hope she won't become rigid here," he said.
She had all her meals served in the drawing-room, and she partook of every course, and had a really fine appetite. Plates with biscuits, with grapes, basins with beef-tea, glasses of milk, champagne bottles, were always standing around her sofa.
"It is making rather a piggery of the place," Everard said more than once to his wife.