his landlady
wrote, "that if I send for a physician he won't pay him and I was up
last night five times and who is going to stand it cough he coughs
something awful and what's going to happen I don't know I expect he's
got typhoid fever or something horrible." She did not use any stops,
but that might have been because she was in a hurry; clearly, however,
she was very angry, and there was only one thing for me to do.

I went round to Lomax Street as fast as I could, and I had no sooner
got inside the house then I heard Owen coughing. I found his landlady
in the state her letter had suggested I should find her, she was
infinitely more sorry for herself than she was for Owen, and since he
was too ill for her to get any satisfaction from visiting her grievance
upon him she started off upon me.

"You are his friend," she said as she met me in the passage, "and you
ought to have been here before. I was just doing myself up before
putting on my bonnet to go out and report this case."

"To whom were you going to report it?" I asked, for I felt very much as
if I should like to know.

"You can report it now, I put all responsibility upon you," she stated
loudly, and she took me up-stairs and announced me in a voice which
would have shaken the nerves of a strong man. I could not put up with
her any longer and I told her abruptly to go. She went energetically,
her shoulders protesting against my rudeness, and she marched down the
stairs with as much noise as she could make without hurting her feet.
I am glad that there are very few landladies left, at least in Oxford,
who look upon any illness as an opportunity for showing how nasty they
can be. I simply hated that woman, and before I had done with her I
was weak enough to tell her so. I was defeated in that battle of plain
speaking. To me, unaccustomed to illness, Owen looked as bad as anyone
could look, and apart from his cough and his temperature he had got all
sorts of worries on his mind which he wanted me to hear. I listened to
what he said without interrupting him, but I was impressed with the
fact that I must creep about a sick-room, and I am afraid I was
ostentatiously quiet. His troubles had to do with the expenses of his
illness, and he beseeched me not to send for a doctor or a nurse. I
tried to set his mind at rest, but I failed; he saw that I thought him
very ill, and when I moved round the room on tiptoe he asked me to make
as much noise as I liked.