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“Damn it, man,” I said. “You talk as if I was a bloody dipsomaniac.”

He was patient. “I didn’t mean your drinking. I mean just this—that you’re knocking yourself to bits. You don’t take care of yourself. Do you, now?”

I lay and stared at him, half expecting to see him furtively consult his notes. He was not at all at his ease, and suddenly it seemed to me that he’d set himself a job that he didn’t like doing. “You’d better tell me what you mean,” I said.

He cleared his throat, and considered for a moment. “I don’t know that I’ve ever had a case quite like you. I’ve never had a patient of your general physique through my hands so often as you, and with such a variety of ailments. Just look at them. You broke your arm in two places last summer in the races, and very nearly lost it, I may say.”

“Gybing in the devil of a sea,” I put in. “You can’t always rely on a vessel when she’s like that—especially if she’s over-canvassed for racing. You know that.”

He nodded. “That’s why every other boat but you made a wheelbarrow tack at the buoy. Then, the winter before, you managed to turn a simple touch of flu into a pleurisy, simply because you wouldn’t lie up.”