A New Sensation. Albert Ross

I agreed with them all. My brain was exhausted with my long illness and responded feebly to the new strength that was returning to my body. It was much easier, however, for people to discover the remedy I needed than to find the right way to apply it. They would never have united in prescribing the same kind of "sensation." What one would suggest would be opposed by the others; and had they come to a united decision in the matter their ideas might not have suited me at all. I was in a condition when it is not easy to make up the mind to anything.

After long reflection, I decided to go and propose marriage to Statia. I had never offered my hand to any woman and it seemed as if that ought to give me at least a diversion, which was something. Not that I intended to make the offer lightly. I had as lief get married as anything else. I was sick to death of idleness—nothing could well be worse than doing nothing, day after day.

But when I had carried out my plan, I left Statia in greater despondency than ever. For she refused me pointblank—something that had not entered into my calculations. She did it, too, in anything but an agreeable manner, as it then seemed to me.

If the reader of these lines has ever gone through a period of insomnia in its most acute form, he will understand the condition in which it leaves a fellow. When Tom's sister laughed me out of court, as one might say, even though she did it with the highest expressions of good will, I was ready for anything desperate.

"You are a silly fellow," she said, as if I were a five years' old child and she my governess. "What kind of a husband do you think you would make? Look back over the last five years of your life and see how much of it does you credit. You think I don't know what you have been up to, and perhaps it is best for me that I don't know all of it; but I am sure, at least, that you have undertaken nothing serious, and that every hour has been practically wasted. A girl has got to have something different in a partner on whom she is to rely for life. And that tale of your physician's advice is worse than all. I am not going to let myself for a hospital. Your health is broken on account of your persistent violation of all hygienic rules. You have no right to quarter yourself on a strong, well girl like me until you can bring something better than you now have to offer."

I was too provoked at her manner, even more than at her words, to reply with much patience. I said, ill-manneredly, I must now admit, that if I did not have my old physique, it was only a question of time when it would return, and that I certainly had something else that many a young man would gladly take in exchange for beef and brawn.

"Oh, that for your fortune!" she said, snapping her fingers disdainfully. "I am not talking of marrying your grandfather, who gathered the dollars you think of such moment. Wealth is a good thing only when harnessed to the right horses. The man that marries me must have a better recommendation. I would give more for a character of sterling merit, a disposition to conquer the difficulties of life, than for all your cash. If the will of Aleck Camran had not tied up his savings, you would have made ducks and drakes of the whole of it before this time."

I was angry at myself for arguing with her. She had a great deal of assurance to address me in that manner, I thought.

"Will or no will, I have a certainty of five thousand dollars a year till I am thirty," I retorted. "How many of the brave young chaps you talk about can gain as much as that? And when I am thirty I get possession of the entire estate, a quarter

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