your loving wife will continue to regard you with an expression of
sympathy, to walk about on tiptoe, and to whisper unaccustomed and
obscure orders to the servants. You may wish to be read to--and your
loving wife will tell you with a sigh that she feels sure you will be
unable to hear her reading, and only grow angry at her awkwardness in
doing it; wherefore you had better not be read to at all. You may wish
to walk about the room--and she will tell you that it would be far
better for you not to do so. You may wish to talk with some friends who
have called--and she will tell you that talking is not good for you. At
nightfall the fever may come upon you again, and you may wish to be
left alone whereupon your loving wife, though wasted, pale, and full of
yawns, will go on sitting in a chair opposite you, as dusk falls, until
her very slightest movement, her very slightest sound, rouses you to
feelings of anger and impatience. You may have a servant who has lived
with you for twenty years, and to whom you are attached, and who would
tend you well and to your satisfaction during the night, for the reason
that he has been asleep all day and is, moreover, paid a salary for
his services; yet your wife will not suffer him to wait upon you. No;
everything she must do herself with her weak, unaccustomed fingers (of
which you follow the movements with suppressed irritation as those pale
members do their best to uncork a medicine bottle, to snuff a candle, to
pour out physic, or to touch you in a squeamish sort of way). If you are
an impatient, hasty sort of man, and beg of her to leave the room, you
will hear by the vexed, distressed sounds which come from her that
she is humbly sobbing and weeping behind the door, and whispering
foolishness of some kind to the servant. Finally if you do not die,
your loving wife--who has not slept during the whole three weeks of your
illness (a fact of which she will constantly remind you)--will fall ill
in her turn, waste away, suffer much, and become even more incapable of
any useful pursuit than she was before; while by the time that you
have regained your normal state of health she will express to you
her self-sacrificing affection only by shedding around you a kind of
benignant dullness which involuntarily communicates itself both to
yourself and to every one else in your vicinity.

The third kind of love--practical love--consists of a yearning to
satisfy every need, every desire, every ca