“It’s the last straw,” she moaned. “Until now I have not been entirely helpless, but this is too much. I am near the end, William.”
“My poor Emmie!” he wailed. “My poor afflicted girl!”
Things were not only no better, for all that we had done, but worse.
Well, Will carried on like a madman, of course. There were specialists from town and a woman to massage her legs, but not a muscle would she move. Except once, when Tish jabbed a pin into her and she jerked and yelled like a lunatic. But she had us beaten, of course, for she had worked it all out in her mind. If she had paralysis she didn’t have to have anything else, and the very first thing she asked for was a broiled beefsteak. After that she ate everything; she ate like a day laborer.
Tish tried skimping on her tray, but if she got one egg instead of two in the morning poor Will would come down looking troubled.
“We must build her up,” he would say. “She needs all the strength we can give her, Letitia.”
And that was the situation when our poor Tish finally took matters into her own hands, with results for which she has been so cruelly blamed.
I have now come to that series of mysterious events which led, with tragic inevitability, to the crisis on the night of our departure. And it may be well here to revert to the subject of spiritualism.
What with one thing and another Tish had apparently lost interest in it, hers being a mind which concentrates on one idea at a time, and having occupied itself almost entirely with Emmie since our arrival.