As to the nature of her malady, that was precisely what we all—except herself—wanted to know. The problem baffled us, and baffled—though he did not confess as much—the expensive Mercester physician to whom my Uncle Claybrook insisted on taking her. ‘Nothing really the matter. A bit run down, that’s all.’ And he gave her a bottle of pink tonic. Her disease, though it plainly reduced her physical vitality, was primarily a disease of the spirit, or so I now suspect. But perhaps in those days health was conceived in purely physiological terms; unhappiness had no status in the hierarchy of diseases; Macbeth’s reproach was still in point. Certainly no tonic, however pink and sweet, could avail with my mother to raze out the written troubles of the brain. Perhaps, too, her troubles lay deeper than the brain; perhaps they were beyond even her own conjecture. She seemed, indeed, sincerely ignorant of what ailed her. She was listless, dispirited, tired of living. And this was so unlike her as to be fantastic as well as terrifying.
What do You think about The Quick And The Dead (1933)?
