I entered next day on what proved to be the most disagreeable stage of my illness. McMeekin called on me in the morning. He performed some silly tricks with a stethoscope and felt my pulse with an air of rapt attention which did not in the least deceive me. Then he intimated that I might sit up for an hour or two after luncheon. The way he made this announcement was irritating enough. Instead of saying straightforwardly, “You can get out of bed if you like,” or words to that effect, he smirked at the nurse and said to her, “I think we may be allowed to sit up in a nice comfortable armchair for our afternoon tea to-day.” But the permission itself was far worse than the manner in which it was given. I did not in the least want to get up. Bed was beginning to feel tolerably comfortable. I hated the thought of an armchair. I hated still more bitterly the idea of having to walk across the floor. I suppose McMeekin saw by my face that I did not want to get up. He tried, after his own foolish fashion, to cheer and encourage me. “Poor Vittie’s got it too,” he said. “I was called in to see him last night.” “Influenza?” “Yes. It’s becoming a perfect epidemic in the district. I have forty cases on my list.” “If Vittie’s got it,” I said, “there’s no reason in the world why I should get up.” McMeekin is a singularly stupid man. He did not see what I meant. I had to explain myself. “The only object I should have in getting up,” I said, speaking very slowly and distinctly, “would be to prevent Vittie going round the constituency when I couldn’t be after him. Now that he’s down himself he can’t do anything more than I can; so I may just as well stay where I am.” Even then McMeekin failed to catch my point. “You’ll have to get up some 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.”