Presently he sat down and gave it to me straight: His high blood pressure. The highly excitable, exciting nature of the life he was leading with me wasn’t good for it. Frankly, it kept his bowels in an uproar, it led to indigestion, it would lead, unless the utmost care was taken, to a recurrence of that awful amoebic dysentery of some five years past. Then: his wretched, wrenched knee-cap (when was that? —oh yes, that day we went to look at the Rolls and he fell out of the car). It was causing him to limp, which was throwing his spine out of line, and this was promoting—any minute now—a slipped disc. How beautifully organic his troubles grew, one out of the other! Executing a stunningly graceful arabesque he managed to connect his hacking morning cough with his split lip (pulling tobacco off it after the cigarette-shooting incident) and banged fingernail (forgotten how). Oh dear—how could one not feel sorry for him? It would be only doing the decent thing to leave him alone for a spell, to turn him out to pasture and let him graze there peacefully awhile before the big push. Passionately, plaintively, pathetically he continued, delving deeper and deeper into the sources of his illnesses, looking so romantically awful that particular day, enfolded in his skin rather like a sick turtle, that even though I was not always attending closely I was relenting; my heart was melting. Then with a jolt I caught something he said. For two weeks now he had felt his hands too unsteady to trust himself shaving—he had given himself some fearful gashes with the razor (a frisson went through me at the great opportunity missed: a slice through the jugular vein and wouldn’t that have done it just!) and had therefore been forced to employ the daily services of Bunty Suffolk’s special barber. So for two whole weeks he’d been throwing away my good money on luxurious kicks for his private pleasure. That was a spine-stiffener.