Book II
28. Chapter XXVIII.
(continued)
The next day Mrs. Manson Mingott was much better:
she recovered her voice sufficiently to give orders
that no one should mention the Beauforts to her again,
and asked--when Dr. Bencomb appeared--what in the
world her family meant by making such a fuss about
her health.
"If people of my age WILL eat chicken-salad in the
evening what are they to expect?" she enquired; and,
the doctor having opportunely modified her dietary,
the stroke was transformed into an attack of indigestion.
But in spite of her firm tone old Catherine did not
wholly recover her former attitude toward life. The
growing remoteness of old age, though it had not
diminished her curiosity about her neighbours, had blunted
her never very lively compassion for their troubles; and
she seemed to have no difficulty in putting the Beaufort
disaster out of her mind. But for the first time she
became absorbed in her own symptoms, and began to
take a sentimental interest in certain members of her
family to whom she had hitherto been contemptuously
indifferent.
Mr. Welland, in particular, had the privilege of
attracting her notice. Of her sons-in-law he was the one
she had most consistently ignored; and all his wife's
efforts to represent him as a man of forceful character
and marked intellectual ability (if he had only "chosen")
had been met with a derisive chuckle. But his
eminence as a valetudinarian now made him an object
of engrossing interest, and Mrs. Mingott issued an
imperial summons to him to come and compare diets
as soon as his temperature permitted; for old Catherine
was now the first to recognise that one could not be
too careful about temperatures.
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