BookRix

There is an old fairy story concerning a pea which a princess once
slept upon--a little offending pea, a minute disturbance, a trifling
departure from the normal which grew to the proportions of intolerable
suffering because of the too sensitive and undisciplined nervous
system of Her Royal Highness. The story, I think, does not tell us
much else concerning the princess. It does not tell us, for instance,
if she was an only child, the sole preoccupation of her parents and
nurses, surrounded by the most anxious care, reared with some
difficulty because of her extraordinary "delicacy," suffering from a
variety of illnesses which somehow always seemed to puzzle the
doctors, though some of the symptoms--the vomiting, for example, and
the high temperature--were very severe and persistent.