He thought it was a splendid idea to have a call bell on the end of a cord, hanging beside his head. He wanted to introduce it at home, though he had the sanity to admit that he didn’t know what would happen if he pressed it with any idea that it would influence Hedgar the Hun.

He had heard (though he was to discover that the tale was false, and told only to make the narrator seem heroic) that in taking a basal-metabolism test he would find it difficult to breathe, and he had every intention of enjoying himself by lying awake and worrying about it. But in the pleasure of not having to wonder whether Howard would call up, late, or wonder at what time Sara would be coming home, he forgot about being insomniac, fell sweetly asleep at ten and awoke in daylight to find a keen young woman in white wheeling into his room what resembled a trench mortar polished up for the use of the crown prince.

The floor nurse was chirping at Fred with the sugared cheerfulness reserved for children, manic-depressives and patients, ‘This is the technician.’

Fred had time only to note that he ought to look into this fact that all hospital technicians were beautiful before the lady pinched his nose with a glorified clothespin and fitted over his amazed and protesting mouth a rubber apparatus through which, she told him coolly, he was to breathe.

That breathing, it seemed, caused a polished plunger to rise up and down in the trench mortar. Instantly scared, but resolved to be gallant, he enjoyed fighting against choking, his body tense, his breath labouring. But he discovered that he was merely making things hard for himself. He quit being gallant and energetic, and therewith the breathing was as natural as though he stood on a hilltop, free of rubber gadgets and hospital beds.

‘Good man! That’s fine,’ said the technician.

He was to treasure that commendation along with the highest distinctions he had known in life; with the letter from the president of the Duplex company saying that his agency had the best credit in the East; with the admission of the golf professional that he had a fairly accurate swing; with the sigh of a very young Hazel that he had been so nice to her father; with his election as vice-president of the Boosters’ Club; and with the remark of his professor of rhetoric, back in Truxon, that his essay on The Character of Portia hadn’t been bad at all.

He was still in the glow of this honour, and the rubber mask had been removed, when the technician, taking his hand tenderly, turned savage and jabbed into his finger a needle stuck in a cork.

‘Ouch!’ he wailed in protest.

It was true that it hadn’t hurt, but he felt that the principle was very bad. Then he was asleep, before he could do anything about it; and he awoke to a tray of ham and eggs, and to Dr. Kamerkink by the bed, saying suspiciously, ‘Why, there doesn’t seem to be one darn thing the matter with you!’