chambers.

CHAPTER LIV. Convalescence

Our duty now is to record a fact concerning Pendennis, which, however
shameful and disgraceful, when told regarding the chief personage and
godfather of a novel, must, nevertheless, be made known to the public
who reads his veritable memoirs. Having gone to bed ill with fever, and
suffering to a certain degree under the passion of love, after he
had gone through his physical malady, and had been bled and had been
blistered, and had had his head shaved, and had been treated and
medicamented as the doctor ordained:--it is a fact, that, when he
rallied up from his bodily ailment, his mental malady had likewise
quitted him, and he was no more in love with Fanny Bolton than you or I,
who are much too wise, or too moral, to allow our hearts to go gadding
after porters' daughters.

He laughed at himself as he lay on his pillow, thinking of this second
cure which had been effected upon him. He did not care the least about
Fanny now: he wondered how he ever should have cared: and according to
his custom made an autopsy of that dead passion, and anatomised his own
defunct sensation for his poor little nurse. What could have made him
so hot and eager about her but a few weeks back? Not her wit, not her
breeding, not her beauty--there were hundreds of women better-looking
than she. It was out of himself that the passion had gone: it did not
reside in her. She was the same; but the eyes which saw were changed;
and, alas, that it should be so! were not particularly eager to see her
any more. He felt very well disposed towards the little thing, and so
forth, but as for violent personal regard, such as he had but a few
weeks ago, it had fled under the influence of the pill and lancet, which
had destroyed the fever in his frame. And an immense source of comfort
and gratitude it was to Pendennis (though there was something selfish
in that feeling, as in most others of our young man), that he had been
enabled to resist temptation at the time when the danger was greatest,
and had no particular cause of self-reproach as he remembered his
conduct towards the young girl. As from a precipice down which he might
have fallen, so from the fever from which he had recovered, he reviewed
the Fanny Bolton snare, now that he had escaped out of it, but I'm
not sure that he was not ashamed of the very satisfaction which he
experienced. It is pleasant, perhaps, but it is humiliating to own that
you love