Alice in bad grace

"A sick man who not at all seldom, though he's reported to childishly deny it, gives out terrible cries of pain, as if he would wholeheartedly let go both his art and his soul to experience what passes in other people for wellness, and yet (the rumour continues) when his unsalutary-looking little room is broken into and someone-not infrequently, at that, someone who loves him-passionately asks him where the pain is, he either declines or seems unable to discuss it at any constructive clinical length, and in the mourning, when even great poets and painters presumably feel a bit more chipper than usual, he looks more perversely determined than ever to see his sickness run its course, as though by the light of another, presumably working day he had remembered that all men, the healthy ones included, eventually die, and usually with a certain amount of bad grace, but that he, lucky man, is at least being done in by the most stimulation companion, disease or no, he has ever known." - Seymore, and introduction
By J.D. Salinger