It is now some time since I was recommended to pass the first four
months of the year in Cairo because I had a sore-throat. The doctor
may have been right, but I shall never divest myself of the idea
that my partners wished to be rid of me while they made certain
changes in the management of the firm. They would not otherwise
have shown such interest every time I blew my nose or relieved my
huskiness by a slight cough;--they would not have been so intimate
with that surgeon from St. Bartholomew's who dined with them twice
at the Albion; nor would they have gone to work directly that my
back was turned, and have done those very things which they could
not have done had I remained at home. Be that as it may, I was
frightened and went to Cairo, and while there I made a trip to Suez
for a week.

I was not happy at Cairo, for I knew nobody there, and the people at
the hotel were, as I thought, uncivil. It seemed to me as though I
were allowed to go in and out merely by sufferance; and yet I paid
my bill regularly every week. The house was full of company, but
the company was made up of parties of twos and threes, and they all
seemed to have their own friends. I did make attempts to overcome
that terrible British exclusiveness, that noli me tangere with which
an Englishman arms himself; and in which he thinks it necessary to
envelop his wife; but it was in vain, and I found myself sitting
down to breakfast and dinner, day after day, as much alone as I
should do if I called for a chop at a separate table in the
Cathedral Coffee-house. And yet at breakfast and dinner I made one
of an assemblage of thirty or forty people. That I thought dull.

But as I stood one morning on the steps before the hotel, bethinking
myself that my throat was as well as ever I remembered it to be, I