"But I don't want to go to sleep." "Oh yes, you do. Besides, if you go on talking, you'll have another hemorrhage." That seemed to frighten her. "Very well," she said, closing her eyes, for already the morphia was pouring wave on wave of lassitude through her body. "Very well, I won't talk. Do you think you can manage to keep me alive for six months? It's rather important. I've got work to do." Thinking her brain already under the influence of the drug, he humored her again. "We'll see about that in the morning. Meanwhile I shouldn't worry. Your daughter-in-law and your secretary between them will be able to manage quite well until you're up and about again." "It isn't that sort of work," began Julia Cavendish; and pretended to fall asleep. This pretense of falling asleep was a trick, learned from the drug. One had only, Julia discovered, to pretend sleep, and nurse or doctor left one entirely alone. Alone with one's dreams. Very curious, very pleasant dreams hers were, too. All about a book. A book called--Now what had she intended to call the book?--"Man's--Man's--Man's Law." Yes--that was the title. If only--one took--enough morphia--one could write--like--like de Quincey. "I mustn't let them give me too much, though," thought Julia; and fell really asleep. 2 For Aliette those first four days of her "mother-in-law's" illness were almost happy. At Julia's particular request, both lovers had abandoned the "ridiculous flat," to take up their abode in Bruton Street; and the sense of self-sacrifice--for it was a sacrifice to abandon the little home where she had been so safe and face the inevitable difficulties of her anomalous position in Julia's household--seemed yet another chance of repaying her debt. Work (she found enormously to do) saved her from overmuch introspection. Julia, the feudalist, had never learned domestic decentralization; her daily secretary, Mrs. Sanderson, a gray-haired gentlewoman with tortoise-shell spectacles and a diffidence which only just avoided crass stupidity, had become a typewriter-thumping automaton; her cook was a mere obedient preparer of ordered meals, and even Kate seemed incapable of performing the simplest household duty on her own initiative. Resultantly there devolved on Aliette, seated of a morning in the novelist's work-room, the manifold activities of a strenuous celebrity, a housekeeper, a woman of property, and an information bureau. For, of course, everybody wanted information about the celebrity's health.