LEERIE Chapter I THE MAN WHO FEARED SLEEP Peter Brooks felt himself for a man given up. He had felt his physical unfitness for some time in the silent, condemning judgment masked under the too sympathetic gaze of his fellow-men; he had felt it in the over-solicitous inquiries after his health made by the staff; and there was his chief, who had fallen into the comfortable week-end habit of telling him he looked first-rate, and in the same breath begging him to take the next week off. For months past he had been conscious of the sidelong glances cast by his brother alumni at the College Club when he appeared, and the way they had of dropping into a contradictory lot of topics whenever he joined a group unexpectedly showed[Pg 4] only too plainly that he had been the real subject under discussion. Yes, he felt that the world at large had turned its thumb down as far as he was concerned, but it had caused him surprisingly little worry until that last visit to Doctor Dempsy. Peter Brooks [Pg 4] There it was as if Peter’s sensibilities concerning himself had suddenly become acute. The doctor sounded too reassuring even for a combined friend and physician; he protested too much that he had found nothing at all the matter with him—nothing at all. When a doctor seems so superlatively anxious to set a man right with himself, it is time to look out; therefore the casual, just-happened-to-mention-it way that he finally broached the question of a sanitarium came within an inch of knocking the last prop from under Peter’s resolve not to lose his grip. For the first time he fully realized how it felt to be given up, and, characteristically, he thanked the Almighty that there was no one to whom it would really matter. For a year he had been slowly going to pieces; for a year he had been dropping in for Dempsy to patch him up. There had been a host of miserable puny ailments[Pg 5] which in themselves meant nothing, but combined and in a young man meant a great deal. Of late his memory had failed him outrageously; he had had frequent attacks of vertigo, and these of themselves had rendered him unreliable and unfit for newspaper work. Irresponsible! Unfit! Peter snorted the words out honestly to himself. Under these conditions, and with no one to care, he could see no plausible reason for trying to coax a mere existence out of life. [Pg 5] To
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