time or other," he said. "You may just as
well start to-day."

When he had left the room I appealed to the nurse.

"Did you ever," I said, "hear a more inane remark than that? In the
first place I have pretty well made up my mind never to get up again. It
isn't worth while for all the good I ever get by being up. In the second
place it's ridiculous to say that because one has to do a thing sometime
one may as well do it at once. You have to be buried sometime, but you
wouldn't like it if McMeekin told you that you might just as well be
buried to-day."

I hold that this was a perfectly sound argument which knocked the bottom
out of McMeekin's absurd statement, but it did not convince the nurse.
As I might have known beforehand she was in league with McMeekin.
Instead of agreeing with me that the man was a fool, she smiled at me in
that particularly trying way called bright and cheery.

"But wouldn't it be nice to sit up for a little?" she said.

"No, it wouldn't."

"It would be a change for you, and you'd sleep better afterward."

"I've got on capitally without sleep for nearly a week and I don't see
any use in reacquiring a habit, a wasteful habit, which I've succeeded
in breaking."

She said something about the doctor's orders.

"The doctor," I replied, "did not give any orders. He gave permission,
which is a very different thing."

I spent some time in explaining the difference between an order and a
permission. I used simple illustrations and made my meaning so plain
that no one could possibly have missed it. The nurse, instead of
admitting that I had convinced her, went out of the room. She came back
again with a cupful of beef tea which she offered me with another bright
smile. If I were not a man with a very high sense of the courtesy due
to women I should have taken the cup and thrown it at her head. It is,
I think, very much to my credit that I drank the beef tea and then did
nothing worse than turn my face to the wall.

At two o'clock she got my dressing gown and somewhat ostentatiously
spread it out on a chair in front of the fire. I lay still and said
nothing, though I saw that she still clung to the idea of getting me
out of bed. Then she rang the bell and made the red-haired girl bring a
dilapidated armchair into the room. She pummelled its cushions with her
fists for some time and then put a pillow on it. This showed me that
she fully expected to succeed in making me sit up. I was perfectly