And on the days on which she happened to be once more kind and affectionate towards him, had shown him some thoughtful attention, he recorded these deceptive signs of a chance of feeling on her part with the fond and skeptical solicitude, the desperate joy of people who, nursing a friend in the last days of an incurable illness, relate as facts of infinitely precious insignificance: “Yesterday he went through his accounts himself, and actually corrected a mistake we had made in adding them up; he ate and egg today and seemed quite to enjoy it, and if he digests it properly we shall try him with a cutlet tomorrow”—although they themselves know that these things are meaningless on the eve of an inevitable death.