“What I should get, Mrs. Molyneux, if I were you,” he said with great emphasis, “is a piece of bread. Get your cook to give you some nice bread, not new you know, stale--stale bread a couple of days old--and steep it in a little milk. Heat the milk (you have a saucepan I expect? that’s capital!)--get a nice saucepan, then, and I should wash it first--get it washed for you--your maid can do that--get it well washed with soap and hot water, that’s right, wash it, and then pour the milk in. You have the milk, say, in a jug--a china jug--quite so--no doubt it stands in the larder, precisely--well, you get your cook to give you that jug of milk, and pour a little into the saucepan and heat it; I shouldn’t boil it--no, I shouldn’t indeed. I should heat it and pour it very gently on the bread. Cut the bread, you know--get a knife and cut it; don’t crumb it--that would be too small--cut it into nice pieces and pour the milk over it--you’ll find the girl will do capitally on it.” We all hear from doctors about the tendency of women to be faddy about their health. The truth of the matter is that every one likes to feel that something about them is of importance to some one, and not only to some one in their own family, but to the outside world. I used to feel that James was an interesting personality to many people; he expounded his views to them, his remarks were received with sympathy, and he got a great deal of patting on the back. I didn’t. Clara and Ruth thought me an eccentric, amiable creature of another breed from themselves, a sort of finish to the house in a way, an ultimate cat on whom to lay responsibility for failure and domestic sin; but they were not interested in me. My women friends were more interested in my habits than in my personal psychology; James was mainly interested in my interest in him. It was sometimes a sore temptation to have a disease, something that would make at least three men shake their heads and wonder what I was doing. They would find out then what an exceptional character I had--what courage, what wit under trying circumstances, what intelligence in household management (the vacant chair, the cold bacon, that would bring it all home to them). James would hurry home in the evening and read letters to me from people who were all interested; he would chat--not quite so long as I wanted, so that I could have the pleasant qualm of missing him--then he would be dispatched downstairs to horrid discomfort where his darling was not, and I should not have to change into a cold evening dress. At last I should fall asleep, comfortable, warm, and washed, knowing that I need not get up next morning and slave and worry in unrecognised monotony. Can anyone wonder that we do it?