and
no nursing. Nursing might well be fatal. Stick to Li Ho. He is your
only chance.

Your Aunt Caroline sends her love. (I told her I was writing you
directions for further treatment). She feels the deprivation of your
letters keenly. She can't see why the writing of a nice, chatty letter
to one's only living Aunt should prove an undue drain upon nervous
energy. Life has taught her not to expect consideration from relatives,
but it does seem hard that her only sister's boy should treat her as if
she were the scarlet fever. To allow himself to be ordered away from
home for a rest cure was certainly less than courteous. To anyone not
understanding the situation it would almost imply that his home was not
restful. And after all the trouble she had taken even to the extent of
strained relations with those Macfarland people who own a rooster. If
the slight had been aimed entirely at herself she could have taken it
silently, but when it included the three or four charming girls whom
she had asked to visit (one at a time) for the purpose of providing
pleasant company, she felt obliged to protest. Although protest, she
knew, was useless. All this, however, she could have borne. The thing
that she could scarcely forgive was the slight offered to his native
town by a departure three days before the set date, thereby turning his
"going away" tea into a "gone away"--an action considered by all
(invited) Bainbridge as a personal insult.

Pause here for breath.

To continue. Your Aunt Caroline does not believe in rest cures anyway.
She thinks poultices are much more effective. It stands to reason that
if a thing is in, it ought to come out. Rest cures are just laziness.
But, thank goodness, she never expected anything from the Spence family
but laziness. And she had told her sister so before she married into
it....

Allow an hour here for ancestral history with appropriate comment and
another hour for a brief review of your own conduct from youth up and
we come within measurable distance of a few words by me. I took up the
point of the four or five nice girls who had been invited to visit. I
put the whole thing down to shock and pointed out that patience is
required. A return to physical normality, I said, would doubtless bring
with it a reviving interest in the sex. It was indeed very fortunate, I
told her, that you were, at present, indifferent. Any question of
selecting a life partner in your present nervous state would be m