These, I am afraid, are only selections from the faded old leaves of my foreign diary, and they are not even representative selections—I seem to have thought a great deal about clothes in those days, and a good deal about young men. I had two proposals, one in Munich and one in Prague, but I managed to get rid of my suitors without invoking the aid of old Miss Linthorpe. It was the news of her dangerous illness that called me back to England before my time was really up. I arrived at home quite unexpected; my father, I remember, greeted me on the door-step with “Hullo, Opal! I’ve been round in 81.” CHAPTER V ON THE SICK LIST More soda-water, and more dry toast? Let me up, you damned saw-bones! W. S. SIMCOX: _The Death-rattle_. Miss Linthorpe died about three weeks later. I suppose even the most selfish of us can look back at one or two really “good deeds” they have put in during the course of their lives; and I must say I think the old lady died the happier for my attendance at her bedside. I found, when I reached her house in Sloane Gardens, that they had called in a young doctor, passionately interested in mind-curing, whose method chiefly consisted of sitting in her room for an hour or so at a time, not talking to her much, but just, as he said, “keeping up her vitality.” The first words she whispered to me as I bent down to kiss her were, “My dear, do get rid of that death’s-head; he depresses me _beyond_ words.” I managed somehow to dispose of him, and as he shut the door behind him—not gently but with a loud bang, no doubt by way of keeping up her vitality—my aunt actually fumbled at the side of her bed and brought out her familiar lorgnettes; then, fixing his imaginary figure with that devastating stare of hers, “Why do I have to pay to be attended by a man who hasn’t even got the sense to see that I’m dying, when I can see it for myself? I suppose he thinks death is some kind of sexual abnormality. Now, my dear, I want you to be very kind, and call in Dr. Matheson—Hodges will give you the address. He’s a rotten doctor, I believe, but I’d sooner be killed off by one of my own generation. One gets these fads, you know.”