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  opportunity simply because I could be alone, and because I need not meet Richard until he had enjoyed a full month of Amy Darling’s society, either succumbing to its fascination or resisting it, as the case might be.

Would it be nobler of me to give him up before he is really mine, knowing that in this way I am advancing his worldly interests? This is the question that I hope solitude will help me to answer, but its complications and side-issues are so many that I feel dazed by their number and their difficulty. I went to sleep last night echoing the old negro’s prayer: “Thou knowest what’s about right, Lord. Now do it!”

8 —Nurse gives me an alcohol bath.

8.30—She takes my pulse and temperature and enters them in the Bedside Record Book, afterwards reading me my diet-list. It seems I do not belong to the favored class, which, to be cured, is stuffed with pleasant things to eat; my symptoms demand a simple, unexciting bill of fare.