"The strong possess a greater capacity for suffering than the weak," Burnham retorted. "Medical science tells us that--" "Please spare me the revelations of the dissecting-room," she cried bitterly; "I am in no condition to bear them." She glanced at him with pathetic eyes, and added, "I ought to have gone to Margate." "I ought to have gone there too," he said. "Really, you make the conversation sound like one of Maeterlinck's plays," she rejoined. "Do be more original." The reproach cut him to the heart. He never knew why, but he felt so much injured that he with great difficulty restrained his tears. "Women can be very brutal," he said moodily, biting his lips, and wondering how many authors it was necessary to read in order never to be at a disadvantage with a clever woman. Mrs Lorton was conscious that she had hurt him, and instead of being her nice, natural self and glorying in the fact, she experienced a sense of profound pity that gave her quite a tightened feeling about the left side. However, she only said, "Men can be very selfish"--a generality that many people consider as convincing as a bomb--and got up to go. "I am staying at the St Mildred's," she remarked. "It is the dull season, so I am the only person there at present." "I beg your pardon," Burnham said, also getting upon his feet, "I am there too. My number is 12 and I have a private sitting-room. I do not feel up to the coffee-room yet." Mrs Lorton turned as pale as ashes with vexation. She had no private sitting-room, and had ordered dinner in the coffee-room for that very evening. She felt herself at a disadvantage as they walked in a gloomy silence towards the beach. III Three days had passed away, and Jack Burnham had found that he was, in his own phrase, "up to the coffee-room" after all. In consequence, Mrs Lorton and he dined there every evening at separate tables. A sense of rivalry--and there is no rivalry more keen than that between contesting invalids--prevented both of them from eating as much as they would have liked. When the widow refused a course, Burnham shook his head at it wearily, and they rose from their meals in a state of passionate hunger, which they solaced with captain's biscuits in the seclusion of their bedrooms. Since they had Westgate almost to themselves, and the weather was becoming bright and warm, they were much out of doors; but their profound depression still continued, and they were as morbid human beings as Max Nordau could have desired to meet with when he was seeking for specimens of degeneration. Their continual greedy anxiety to narrate the details of their physical and mental sensations drove them to seek one another's company, and soon it became an understood thing that they should sit together on the lawn or in the winter garden during the morning, and stroll feebly in the direction of Margate during the breezy afternoon.