it over and advise her and caution her and warn her and tell her horrible tales of great-aunts and cousins forty times removed who had been “just like that and dropped dead without a moment’s warning, my dear.”

Aunt Isabel would remember that she had always said Doss looked like a girl who would have heart trouble — ”so pinched and peaked always”; and Uncle Wellington would take it as a personal insult, when “no Stirling ever had heart disease before”; and Georgiana would forebode in perfectly audible asides that “poor, dear little Doss isn’t long for this world, I’m afraid”; and Cousin Gladys would say, “Why, my heart has been like that for years,” in a tone that implied no one else had any business even to have a heart; and Olive —