you or a theorbo to cheer you would ransack the markets
of London and procure them somehow, wrapped in paper,
before the end of the day; the frivolous K. T., dressed in
silks and feathers, painted and powdered (which takes time
too) as if for a banquet of Kings and Queens, who spends
her whole brightness in the gloom of the sick room, and
makes the medicine bottles ring and the flames shoot up
with her gossip and her mimicry. But such follies have
had their day; civilisation points to a different goal; if the
cities of the Middle West are to blaze with electric light,
Mr. Insull ‘must keep twenty or thirty engagements
every day of his working months’—and then, what place
is there be for the tortoise and the theorbo?
There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great con-
fessional) a childish outspokenness in illness; things are
said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability
of health conceals. About sympathy for example; we can
do without it. That illusion of a world so shaped
that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied
together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one
wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience
other people have had it too, where however far you
travel in your own mind someone has been there before
you—is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls,
let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand
in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin
forest, tangled, pathless, in each; a snow field where even
the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and
like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be
accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
But in health the genial pretence must be kept up and the
effort renewed—to communicate, to civilise, to share, to
cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work by day
together and by night to sport. In illness this make-believe
ceases. Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among
pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch above
