The consumptive, yes! Stout flannel shirts for old shepherds who must tend the birth of lambs on bitter Spring midnights. Food for the tramp, too--no dusty wayfarer should go unsatisfied from the Lothians' house! But not the subsequent shilling for beer and shag and the humble luxury of the Inn kitchen that Gilbert would have bestowed.
Such was her wise penuriousness in its calm economy of the angels!
Yet, her husband had his economy also. Odd as it was, it was part of his temperament. If he had bought a rare and perfect object of art, and then met some one who he saw longed for it, but couldn't afford to have it in the ordinary way, he took a real delight in giving it. But it would have been easier for him to lop off a hand than to present one of the Toftrees' novels to any one who was thirsting for something to read. He would have thought it immoral to do so.
He had a great row with his wife when she presented a gaudy pair of pink-gilt vases to an ex-housemaid who was about to be married.
"But dear, she's _delighted_," Mary had said.
"You've committed a crime! It's disgraceful. Oblige me by never doing anything of the sort again. Why didn't you give her a ham?"
"Hadn't you better have a pipe? The doctor said that you smoked far too many cigarettes and that they were bad for you."
For three days Lothian had had nothing to drink but a glass of Burgundy at lunch and dinner. Lying in bed, perfectly tranquil, calling upon no physical resources, the sense of nerve-rest within him was grateful and profound.
But the inebriate lives almost entirely upon momentary sensation. The slightest recrudescence of health makes him forget the horrors of the past.
In the false calm of his quiet room, his tended state, the love and care surrounding him, Gilbert had already come to imagine that he was what he hoped to be in his saner moments. He had, at the moment, not the least desire for a drink. In three days he was already complacent and felt himself strong!
Yet his nerves were still unstable and every impulse was on a hair trigger, so to speak.
He knew well enough that when he began to smoke pipes the most pressing desire of the other narcotic, alcohol, became numbed. Cigarettes stimulated that desire, or at least accompanied it. He could not live happily without cigarettes.