hed me. In spite of my absolutely
sickening disgust, I felt with a ferocious joy that my opportunity had
at last come. McMeekin tried to persuade me to eat some sticky yellow
liquid out of the bowl. I refused, of course. As I had foreseen, he
began to shovel the stuff into my mouth with the spoon. Titherington
came over to my bedside. He pretended that he came to hold me up while
McMeekin fed me. In reality he came to gloat. But I had my revenge. I
pawed McMeekin with my hands and breathed full into his face. I also
clutched Titherington's coat and pawed him. After that I felt easier,
for I began to hope that I had thoroughly infected them both. My
recollections of the next day are confused. Titherington and McMeekin
were constantly passing in and out of the room and at some time or other
a strange woman arrived who paid a deference which struck me as
perfectly ridiculous to McMeekin. To me she made herself most offensive.
I found out afterward that she was the nurse whom McMeekin had summoned
by telegraph. What she said to McMeekin or what he said to her I cannot
remember. Of my own actions during the day I can say nothing certainly
except this: I asked McMeekin, not once or twice, but every time I saw
him, how long it took for influenza to develop its full strength in a
man who had thoroughly imbibed the infection. McMeekin either would not
or could not answer this simple question. He talked vague nonsense about
periods of incubation, whereas I wanted to know the earliest date at
which I might expect to see him and Titherington stricken down, I hated
McMeekin worse than ever for his dogged stupidity.

The next day McMeekin said I was better, which showed me that
Titherington was right in saying that he was no damned use as a doctor.
I was very distinctly worse. I was, in fact, so bad that when the nurse
insisted on arranging the bedclothes I burst into tears and sobbed
afterward for many hours. That ought to have shown her that arranging
bedclothes was particularly bad for me. But she was an utterly callous
woman. She arranged them again at about eight o'clock and told me to go
to sleep. I had not slept at all since I got the influenza and I could
not sleep then, but I thought it better to pretend to sleep and I lay as
still as I could. After I had been pretending for a long while, at some
hour in the very middle of the night, Titherington burst into my room
in a noisy way. He was in evening dress and his shirt front h