III

It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience by
pushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend's neurasthenic
wife. He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and more sheltered
seat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than San Remo. He
wrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no preoccupation to
hinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald. He put the case
first in the order of interest rather purposely, and even with a sense
of effort, though he could not deny to himself that a like case related
to a different personality might have been less absorbing. But he tried
to keep his scientific duty to it pure of that certain painful pleasure
which, as a young man not much over thirty, he must feel in the strange
affliction of a young and beautiful girl.

Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be installed
near her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making him,
without contravention of the social formalities. His care of her hardly
differed from that of her father, except that it involved a closer and
more premeditated study. They did not try to keep her from the sort of
association which, in a large hotel of the type of the Sardegna, entails
no sort of obligation to intimacy. They sat together at the long table,
midway of the dining-room, which maintained the tradition of the old
table-d'hôte against the small tables ranged along the walls. Gerald had
an amiable old man's liking for talk, and Lanfear saw that he willingly
escaped, among their changing companions, from the pressure of his
anxieties. He left his daughter very much to Lanfear, during these
excursions, but Lanfear was far from meaning to keep her to himself. He