The doctors had always said that I had a remarkable constitution, but I had never developed it or my body through exercise.

My muscles were small and soft, like a woman's, or so the doctors had said time and again in the course of their attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture fads.

But I had preferred to use my head rather than my body; and here I was, in no fit condition for the rough life in prospect.
These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and are related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the weak and helpless _role_ I was destined to play.

But I thought, also, of my mother and sisters, and pictured their grief.

I was among the missing dead of the _Martinez_ disaster, an unrecovered body.