Something of a sportsman, too, is the Auto-comrade. He it is who makes

the fabulously low score at golf--the kind of score, by the way, that

is almost invariably born to blush unseen. And he will uncomplainingly,

even zestfully, fish from dawn to dusk in a solitude so complete that

there is not even a fin to break it. But if there are fish, he finds

them. He knows how to make the flies float indefinitely forward through

yonder narrow opening, and drop, as light as thistledown, in the center

of the temptingly inaccessible pool. He knows without looking exactly

how thick and prehensile are the bushes and branches that lie in wait

for the back cast, and he can calculate to a grain how much urging the

sulky four-pounder and the blest tie that binds him to the four-ounce

rod will stand.

He is one of the handiest possible persons to have along in the woods.

When you take him on a canoe-trip with others, and the party comes to

“white water,” he turns out to be a dead shot at rapid-shooting. He

is sure to know what to do at the supreme moment when you jam your

setting-pole immutably between two rocks and, with the alternative

of making a hole in the water, are forced to let it go and grab your

paddle. And before you have time to reflect that the pale-face in the

bow can be depended upon to do just one thing at such a time, and

that is the exact opposite of what you are urging him to do, you are

hung up on a slightly submerged rock at the head of the chief rapid

just in time to see the rest of the party disappear around the lower

bend. At such a time, simply look to the Auto-comrade. He will carry

you through. Also there is no one like him at the moment when, having

felled your moose, leaned your rifle against a tree, and bent down the

better to examine him, the creature suddenly comes back to life.

In tennis, when you wake up to find that your racket has just smashed

a lob on the bounce from behind the court, making a clean ace between

your paralyzed opponents, you ought to know that the racket was guided

by that superior sportsman; and if you are truly modest, you will

admit that the miraculous triple play wherewith your team whisked the

base-ball championship out of the fire in the fourteenth inning was

pulled off by the unaided efforts of a certain Young Men’s Christian

Association of Auto-comrades.

There are other games about which he is not so keen: solitaire, for

instance. For solitaire is a social game that soon loses its zest if

there be not some devoted friend or relative sitting by and simulating

that pleasurable absorption in the performance which you yourself only

wish that you could feel.

This great companion can keep you from being lonely even in a crowd.

But there is a certain kind of crowd that he cannot abide. Beware how

you try to keep him in a crowd of unadulterated human porcupines! You

know how the philosopher Schopenhauer once likened average humanity to

a herd of porcupines on a cold day, who crowd stupidly together for

warmth, prick one another with their quills, are mutually repelled,

forget the incident, grow cold again, and repeat the whole thing ad

infinitum.

In other words, the human porcupine is the person considered at the

beginning of this one-sided discussion who, to escape the terrible

catastrophe of confronting his own inner vacuum, will make friends with

the most hideous bore. This creature, however, is much more rare than

the misanthropic Schopenhauer imagined. It takes a long time to find

one among such folk as lumbermen, Gipsies, shirt-waist operatives,

fishermen, masons, trappers, sailors, tramps, and teamsters. If the

philosopher had only had the pleasure of knowing those teamsters who

sent him into paroxysms of rage by cracking their whips in the alley,

I am sure that he would never have spoken so harshly of their minds

as he did. The fact is that porcupines are not extremely common among

the very “common” people. It may be that there is something stupefying

about the airs which the upper classes, the best people, breathe and

put on, but the social climber is apt to find the human porcupine in

increasing herds as he scales the heights. This curious fact would

seem incidentally to show that our misanthropic philosopher must have

moved exclusively in some of the best circles.

Now, if there is one thing above all others that the Auto-comrade

cannot away with, it is the flaccid, indolent, stodgy brain of

the porcupine. If people have let their minds slump down into

porcupinishness, or have never taken the trouble to rescue them from

that ignominious condition--well, the Auto-comrade is no snob; when

all’s said, he is a rather democratic sort of chap, though he has to

draw the line somewhere, you know, and he really must beg to be excused

from rubbing shoulders with such intellectual rabble, for instance,

as blocks upper Fifth Avenue on Sunday noons. He prefers instead the

rabble which, on all other noons of the week, blocks the lower end of

that variegated thoroughfare.

Such exclusiveness lays the Auto-comrade open, of course, to the charge

of inhospitality. But “is not he hospitable,” asks Thoreau, “who

entertains good thoughts?” Personally, I think he is. And I believe

that this sort of hospitality does more to make the world worth living

in than much conventional hugging to your bosom of porcupines whose

language you do not speak, yet with whom it is embarrassing to keep

silence.

If the Auto-comrade mislikes the porcupine, however, the feeling

is returned with exorbitant interest. The alleged failings of

auto-comradeship have always drawn grins, fleers, nudges, and jokes

from the auto-comradeless. It is time the latter should know that the

joke is really on him; for he is the most forlorn of mankind. The other

is never at a loss. He is invulnerable, being one whom “destiny may not

surprise nor death dismay.” But the porcupine is liable at any moment

to be deserted by associates who are bored by his sharp, hollow quills.

He finds himself the victim of a paradox which decrees that the hermit

shall “find his crowds in solitude” and never be alone; but that the

flocker shall every now and then be cast into inner darkness, where

“there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

The laugh is on the porcupine; but the laugh turns almost into a tear

when one stops to realize the nature of his plight. Why, the poor

wretch is actually obliged to be near some one else in order to enjoy

a sense of vitality! In other words, he needs somebody else to do his

living for him. He is a vicarious citizen of the world, holding his

franchise only by courtesy of Tom, Dick, and Harry.

All the same, it is rather hard to pity him very profoundly while he

continues to feel quite so contemptuously superior as he usually does.

Why, the contempt of the average porcupine for pals of the Auto-comrade

is akin to the contempt which the knights of chivalry felt for those

paltry beings who were called clerks because they possessed the queer,

unfashionable accomplishment of being able to read and write.

I remember that the loudest laugh achieved by a certain class-day

orator at college came when he related how the literary guy and the

tennis-player were walking one day in the woods, and the literary guy

suddenly exclaimed: “Ah, leave me, Louis! I would be alone.” Even apart

from the stilted language in which the orator clothed the thought of

the literary guy, there is, to the porcupine, something irresistibly

comic in such a situation. It is to him as though the literary guy had

stepped up to the nearest policeman and begged for the room at Sing

Sing already referred to.

Indeed, the modern porcupine is as suspicious of pals of the

Auto-comrade as the porcupines of the past were of sorcerers and

witches--folk, by the way, who probably consorted with spirits no more

malign than Auto-comrades. “What,” asked the porcupines of one another,

“can they be up to, all alone there in those solitary huts? What honest

man would live like that? Ah, they must be up to no good. They must be

consorting with the Evil One. Well, then, away with them to the stake

and the river!”

As a matter of fact, it probably was not the Evil One that these poor

folk were consorting with, but the Good One. For what is a man’s

Auto-comrade, anyway, but his own soul, or the same thing by what other

name soever he likes to call it with which he divides the practical,

conscious part of his brain, turn and turn about, share and share

alike? And what is a man’s own soul but a small stream of the infinite,

eternal water of life? And what is heaven but a vast harbor where

myriad streams of soul flow down, returning at last to their Source

in the bliss of perfect reunion? I believe that many a Salem witch was

dragged to her death from sanctuary; for church is not exclusively

connected with stained glass and collection-baskets. Church is also

wherever you and your Auto-comrade can elude the starched throng and

fall together, if only for a moment, on your knees.

Like the girl you left behind you, your Auto-comrade has much to gain

by contrast with your flesh-and-blood associates, especially if this

contrast is suddenly brought home to you after a too long separation

from him. I shall never forget the thrill that was mine early one

morning after two months of close, uninterrupted communion with one

of my best and dearest friends. At the very instant when the turn of

the road cut off that friend’s departing hand-wave, I was aware of

a welcoming, almost boisterous shout from the hills of dream, and,

turning quickly, beheld my long-lost Auto-comrade rushing eagerly down

the slopes toward me.

Few joys may compare with the joy of such a sudden, unexpected reunion.

It is like “the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land.” No, this

simile is too disloyal to my friend. Well, then, it is like a beaker

full of the warm South when you are leaving a good beer country and are

trying to reconcile yourself to ditch-water for the next few weeks. At

any rate, similes or not, there were we two together again at last.

What a week of weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on the veranda

of our log cabin, where we overlooked the pleasant sinuosities of the

Sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostly birch and

blood-red maple banners to the purple mountains of the Aroostook. And

how we did take stock of the immediate past, chuckling to find that

it had not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidly supposed. What

gilded forest trails were those which we blazed into the glamourous

land of to-morrow! And every other moment these recreative labors

would be interrupted while I pressed between the pages of a note-book

some butterfly or sunset leaf or quadruply fortunate clover which my

Auto-comrade found and turned over to me. Between two of those pages,

by the way, I afterward found the argument of this paper.

Then, when the first effervescence of our meeting had lost a little of

its first, fine, carbonated sting, what Elysian hours we spent over

the correspondence of those other two friends, Goethe and Schiller!

Passage after passage we would turn back to re-read and muse over.

These we would discuss without any of the rancor or dogmatic insistence

or one-eyed stubbornness that usually accompany the clash of mental

steel on mental steel from a different mill. And without making any one

else lose the thread or grow short-breathed or accuse us passionately

of reading ahead, we would, on the slightest provocation, out-Fletcher

Fletcher chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy. And we would

underline and bracket and side-line and overline the ragged little

paper volume, and scribble up and down its margins, and dream over its

foot-notes, to our hearts’ content.

Such experiences, though, are all too rare with me. Why? Because my

Auto-comrade is a rather particular person and will not associate with

me unless I toe his mark.

“Come,” I propose to him, “let us go on a journey.”

“Hold hard,” says he, and looks me over appraisingly. “You know the

rule of the Auto-comrades’ Union. We are supposed to associate with

none but fairly able persons. Are you a fairly able person?”

If it turns out that I am not, he goes on a rampage, and begins to

talk like an athletic trainer. The first thing he demands is that his

would-be associate shall keep on hand a jolly good store of surplus

vitality. You are expected to supply him exuberance somewhat as you

supply gasolene to your motor.

Now, of course, there are in the world not a few invalids and other

persons of low physical vitality whose Auto-comrades happen to have

sufficient gasolene to keep them both running, if only on short

rations. Most of these cases, however, are pathological. They have hot

boxes at both ends of the machine, and their progress is destined all

too soon to cease and determine. The rest of these cases are the rare

exceptions which prove the rule. For unexuberant yet unpathological

pals of the Auto-comrade are as rare as harmonious households in which

the efforts of a devoted and blissful wife support an able-bodied

husband.

The rule is that you have got to earn exuberance for two. “Learn to

eat balanced rations right,” thunders the Auto-comrade, laying down

the law; “exercise, perspire, breathe, bathe, sleep out of doors, and

sleep enough, rule your liver with a rod of iron, don’t take drugs or

nervines, cure sickness beforehand, do an adult’s work in the world,

have at least as much fun as you ought to have.”

“That,” he goes on, “is the way to develop enough physical exuberance

so that you will be enabled to overcome your present sad addiction to

mob intoxication. And, provided your mind is not in as bad condition as

your body, this physical over-plus will transmute some of itself into a

spiritual exuberance. This will enable you to have more fun with your

mind than an enthusiastic kitten has with its tail. It will enable you

to look before and after, and purr over what is, as well as to discern,

with pleasurable longing, what is not, and set forth confidently to

capture it.”

But if, by any chance, you have allowed your mind to get into the sort

of condition which the old-fashioned German scholar used to allow his

body to get into, it develops that the Auto-comrade hates a flabby

brain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it

clear that he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet

mastered the vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also,

he demands of his companion the knack of calm, consecutive thought.

This is one reason why so many more Auto-comrades are to be found in

crow’s-nests, Gipsy-vans, and shirt-waist factories than on upper

Fifth Avenue. For, watching the stars and the sea from a swaying

masthead, taking light-heartedly to the open road, or even operating

a rather unwholesome sewing-machine all day in silence, is better for

consecutiveness of mind than a never-ending round of offices, clubs,

servants, committee meetings, teas, dinners, and receptions, to each of

which one is a little late.

No matter what the ignorant or the envious may say, there is

nothing really unsocial in a moderate indulgence in the art of

auto-comradeship. A few weeks of it bring you back a fresher, keener

appreciator of your other friends and of humanity in general than you

were before setting forth. In the continuous performance of the psalm

of life such contrasts as this of solos and choruses have a reciprocal

advantage.

But auto-comradeship must not be overdone, as it was overdone by the

medieval monks. Its delights are too delicious, its particular vintage

of the wine of experience too rich, for long-continued consumption.

Consecutive thought, though it is one of man’s greatest pleasures, is

at the same time almost the most arduous labor that he can perform.

And after a long spell of it, both the Auto-comrade and his companion

become exhausted and, perforce, less comradely.

Besides the incidental exhaustion, there is another reason why this

beatific association must have its time-limit; for, unfortunately,

one’s Auto-comrade is always of the same sex as oneself, and in youth,

at least, if the presence of the complementary part of creation is long

denied, there comes a time when this denial surges higher and higher

in subconsciousness, then breaks into consciousness, and keeps on

surging until it deluges all the tranquillities, zests, surprises, and

excitements of auto-comradeship, and makes them of no effect.

This is, perhaps, a wise provision for the salvation of the human

digestion. For, otherwise, many a man, having tasted of the fruit of

the tree of the knowledge of auto-comradeship, might thereupon be

tempted to retire to his hermit’s den hard by and endeavor to sustain

himself for life on apple-sauce.

Most of us, however, long before such extremes have been reached,

are sure to rush back to our kind for the simple reason that we are

enjoying auto-comradeship so much that we want some one else to enjoy

it with.

THE WHITE LINEN NURSE

HOW RAE MALGREGOR UNDERTOOK GENERAL HEARTWORK FOR A FAMILY OF TWO

BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

Author of “Molly Make-Believe,” etc.

IN THREE PARTS: PART THREE

WITH PICTURES BY HERMAN PFEIFER

SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING INSTALMENTS

On the day of her graduation from the training-school, the White

Linen Nurse was overcome by hysteria. For weeks she had been

working too hard, and two or three cases with which she had been

connected having gone wrong, she had racked herself with an absurd

sense of responsibility. Now, in her distracted state, the visible

sign of her self-contempt was the perfectly controlled expression

of her trained-nurse face.

From a scene in her room with her two room-mates, in which

confidences are exchanged, she rushed to the office of the

Superintendent of Nurses, and hysterically demanded her own face.

The Senior Surgeon was sent for, and after tartly telling the girl

she was a fool, finally took her with him and his little crippled

daughter for a thirty-mile trip into the country, where he had been

summoned on a difficult case.

On their return, the Senior Surgeon lost control of the machine on

a steep hill, and the three were thrown out.

On recovering consciousness, the White Linen Nurse and the Child

find the Senior Surgeon pinned under their motor-car, and after

receiving instructions as to its management, the Nurse runs the car

into a brook, and the Senior Surgeon becomes aware for the first

time that the car is afire. Momentarily unnerved by the thought of

the peril in which he has been, the Senior Surgeon clings to the

White Linen Nurse, and finally proposes that, since she has decided

to give up professional nursing, she take up General Heartwork

for him and his daughter. The proposal is in fact a proposal of

marriage, and after a frank discussion of the situation (which is

one of the most significant and powerful pieces of work of the

author), the White Linen Nurse accepts.

In the course of the discussion the Senior Surgeon confesses an

inherited tendency for drink, and adds that he leaves liquor alone

for eleven months in the year, but always goes off to Canada every

June for a hunting-trip, on which he drinks heavily. She insists

that he go this year and that they marry before his departure, and

not on his return, as he wishes. She wins her way, and the Senior

Surgeon goes alone. Disquieting letters from her recall him before

the end of the month.

Nobody looks very well in the dawn. Certainly the Senior Surgeon

didn’t. Heavily, as a man wading through a bog of dreams, he stumbled

out of his cabin into the morning. Under his drowsy, brooding eyes

appalling shadows circled. Behind his sunburn, deeper than his tan,

something sinister and uncanny lurked wanly like the pallor of a soul.

Yet the Senior Surgeon had been most blamelessly abed and asleep since

griddle-cake-time the previous evening.

Only the mountains and the forest and the lake had been out all night.

For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the

forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all

night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil, the listless lake

kindled wanly to the new day’s breeze. Blue with cold, a precipitous

mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog.

Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine-tree

lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. As monotonous as a sob,

the waiting birch canoe _slosh-sloshed_ against the beach.

There was no romantic smell of red roses in this June landscape; just

tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and

the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched

for a whole year with a tinful of wet coffee-grounds.

Gliding out cautiously into the lake as though the mere splash of

a paddle might shatter the whole glassy surface, the Indian guide

propounded the question that was uppermost in his mind.

“Cutting your trip a bit short this year, ain’t you, Boss?” he quizzed

tersely.

Out from his muffling Mackinaw collar the Senior Surgeon parried the

question with an amazingly novel sense of embarrassment.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered with studied lightness. “There are one

or two things at home that are bothering me a little.”

“A woman, eh?” said the Indian guide, laconically.

“A _woman_?” thundered the Senior Surgeon. “A--woman? Oh, ye gods, no!

It’s wall-paper.”

Then suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of his passionate

refutation the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing, boisterously,

hilariously, like a crazy school-boy. Bluntly from an overhanging ledge

of rock the echo of his laugh came mocking back at him. Down from some

unvisioned mountain fastness the echo of that echo came wafting faintly

to him.

The Senior Surgeon’s laugh was made of teeth and tongue and palate

and a purely convulsive physical impulse; but the echo’s laugh was

a fantasy of mist and dawn and inestimable balsam-scented spaces,

where little green ferns and little brown beasties and soft-breasted

birdlings frolicked eternally in pristine sweetness.

Seven miles farther down the lake, at the beginning of the rapids,

the Indian guide spoke again. Racking the canoe between two rocks,

paddling, panting, pushing, sweating, the Indian guide lifted his voice

high, piercing, above the swirling roar of waters.

“Eh, Boss,” he shouted, “I ain’t never heard you laugh before!”

Neither man spoke again more than once or twice during the long,

strenuous hours that were left to them. The Indian guide was very busy

in his stolid mind trying to figure out just how many rows of potatoes

could be planted fruitfully between his front door and his cowshed. I

don’t know what the Senior Surgeon was trying to figure out.

It was just four days later, from a rolling, musty-cushioned hack, that

the Senior Surgeon disembarked at his own front gate.

Even though a man likes home no better than he likes--tea, few men

would deny the soothing effect of home at the end of a long, fussy

railroad journey. Five o’clock, also, of a late June afternoon is a

peculiarly wonderful time to be arriving home, especially if that home

has a garden about it, so that you are thereby not rushed precipitously

upon the house itself, as upon a cup without a saucer, but can toy

visually with the whole effect before you quench your thirst with the

actual draft.

Very, very deliberately, with his clumsy rod-case in one hand, and

his heavy grip in the other, the Senior Surgeon started up the long,

broad gravel path to the house. For a man walking as slow as he was,

his heart was beating most extraordinarily fast. He was not accustomed

to heart-palpitation. The symptom worried him a trifle. Incidentally,

also, his lungs felt strangely stifled with the scent of June. Close

at his right, an effulgent white-and-gold syringa-bush flaunted its

cloying sweetness into his senses. Close at his left, a riotous bloom

of phlox clamored red-blue-purple-lavender-pink into his dazzled

vision. Multicolored pansies tiptoed velvet-footed across the grass. In

soft, murky mystery a flame-tinted smoke-tree loomed up here and there

like a faintly rouged ghost. Over everything, under everything, through

everything, lurked a certain strange, novel, vibrating consciousness of

occupancy--bees in the rose-bushes, bobolinks in the trees, a woman’s

work-basket in the curve of the hammock, a doll’s tea-set sprawling

cheerfully in the middle of the broad gravel path.

It was not until the Senior Surgeon had actually stepped into the tiny

cream-pitcher that he noticed the presence of the doll’s tea-set. It

was what the Senior Surgeon said as he stepped out of the cream-pitcher

that summoned the amazing apparition from a ragged, green hole in the

privet hedge. Startlingly white, startlingly professional,--dress,

cap, apron, and all,--a miniature white linen nurse sprang suddenly

out at him like a tricky dwarf in a moving-picture show. Just at that

particular moment the Senior Surgeon’s nerves were in no condition

to wrestle with apparitions. Simultaneously, as the clumsy rod-case

dropped from his hand, the expression of enthusiasm dropped from the

face of the miniature white linen nurse.

“Oh, dear! oh, dear! oh, dear! have _you_ come home!” wailed the

familiar, shrill little voice.

Sheepishly the Senior Surgeon picked up his rod-case. The noises in his

head were crashing like cracked bells. Desperately, with a boisterous

irritability, he sought to cover also the lurching _pound, pound,

pound_ of his heart.

“What in hell are you rigged out like that for?” he demanded stormily.

With equal storminess the Little Girl protested the question.

“Peach said I could,” she attested passionately. “Peach said I could,

she did! She did! I tell you, I didn’t want her to marry us that day.

I was afraid, I was. I cried, I did. I had a convulsion; they thought

it was stockings. So Peach said, if it would make me feel any gooderer,

I could be the cruel new stepmother, and _she’d_ be the unloved

offspring, with her hair braided all yellow fluffikins down her back.”

“Where _is_--Miss Malgregor?” asked the Senior Surgeon, sharply.

Irrelevantly the Little Girl sank down on the gravel walk and began to

gather up her scattered dishes.

“And it’s fun to go to bed now,” she confided amiably, “’cause every

night I put Peach to bed at eight o’clock, and she’s so naughty always

I have to stay with her. And then all of a sudden it’s morning--like

going through a black room without knowing it.”

“I said, where _is_ Miss Malgregor?” repeated the Senior Surgeon, with

increasing sharpness.

Thriftily the Little Girl bent down to lap a bubble of cream from the

broken pitcher.

“Oh, she’s out in the summer-house with the Wall-Paper Man,” she

mumbled indifferently.

Altogether jerkily the Senior Surgeon started up the walk for his own

perfectly formal and respectable brownstone mansion. Deep down in

his lurching heart he felt a sudden most inordinate desire to reach

that brownstone mansion just as quickly as possible, but abruptly even

to himself he swerved off instead at the yellow sassafras-tree and

plunged quite wildly through a mass of broken sods toward the rickety,

no-account, cedar summer-house.

Startled by the crackle and thud of his approach, the two young figures

in the summer-house jumped precipitously to their feet, and, limply

untwining their arms from each other’s necks, stood surveying the

Senior Surgeon in unspeakable consternation,--the White Linen Nurse and

a blue-overalled lad most unconscionably mated in radiant youth and

agonized confusion.

“Oh, my Lord, sir!” gasped the White Linen Nurse--“oh, my Lord, sir! I

wasn’t looking for _you_ for another week!”

“Evidently not,” said the Senior Surgeon, incisively. “This is

the second time this evening that I’ve been led to infer that my

home-coming was distinctly inopportune.”

Very slowly, very methodically, he put down first his precious rod-case

and then his grip. His brain seemed fairly foaming with blood and

confusion. Along the swelling veins of his arms a dozen primitive

instincts went surging to his fists.

Then quite brazenly before his eyes the White Linen Nurse reached out

and took the lad’s hand again.

“Oh, forgive me, Dr. Faber!” she faltered. “This is my brother.”

“Your _brother_? What? Eh?” choked the Senior Surgeon. Bluntly he

reached out and crushed the young fellow’s fingers in his own. “Glad to

see you, son,” he muttered, with a sickish sort of grin, and, turning

abruptly, picked up his baggage again and started for the big house.

Half a step behind him his bride followed softly.

At the edge of the piazza he turned for an instant and eyed her a

bit quizzically. With her big, credulous blue eyes, and her great

mop of yellow hair braided childishly down her back, she looked

inestimably more juvenile and innocent than his own little shrewd-faced

six-year-old, whom he had just left domestically ensconced in the

middle of the broad gravel path.

“For Heaven’s sake, Miss Malgregor,” he asked--“for Heaven’s sake, why

didn’t you tell me that the Wall-Paper Man was your brother?”

Very contritely the White Linen Nurse’s chin went burrowing down into

the soft collar of her dress, and as bashfully as a child one finger

came stealing up to the edge of her red, red lips.

“I was afraid you’d think I was--cheeky, having any of my family come

and live with us so soon,” she murmured almost inaudibly.

“Well, what did you think I’d think you were if he wasn’t your

brother?” asked the Senior Surgeon, sardonically.

“Very economical, I hoped,” beamed the White Linen Nurse.

“All the same,” snapped the Senior Surgeon, with an irrelevance

surprising even to himself--“all the same, do you think it sounds quite

right and proper for a child to call her stepmother ’Peach’?”

Again the White Linen Nurse’s chin went burrowing down into the soft

collar of her dress.

“I don’t suppose it _is_ usual,” she admitted reluctantly. “The

children next door, I notice, call theirs ’Crosspatch.’”

With a gesture of impatience, the Senior Surgeon proceeded on up the

steps, yanked open the old-fashioned shuttered door, and burst quite

breathlessly and unprepared upon his most amazingly reconstructed

house. All in one single second chintzes, muslins, pale blond maples,

riotous canary-birds stormed revolutionarily upon his outraged eyes.

Reeling back utterly aghast before the sight, he stood there staring

dumbly for an instant at what he considered, and rightly too, the

absolute wreck of his black-walnut home.

“It looks like--hell!” he muttered feebly.

“Yes, _isn’t_ it sweet?” conceded the White Linen Nurse, with

unmistakable joyousness. “And your library--” Triumphantly she threw

back the door to his grim workshop.

“Good God!” stammered the Senior Surgeon, “you’ve made it pink!”

Rapturously the White Linen Nurse began to clasp and unclasp her hands.

“I knew you’d love it,” she said.

Half dazed with bewilderment, the Senior Surgeon started to brush an

imaginary haze from his eyes, but paused midway in the gesture, and

pointed back instead to a dapper little hall-table that seemed to be

exhausting its entire blond strength in holding up a slender green

vase with a single pink rose in it. Like a caged animal buffeting for

escape against each successive bar that incased it, the man’s frenzied

irritation hurled itself hopefully against this one more chance for

explosive exit.

“What--have--you--done--with the big--black--escritoire that

stood--_there_?” he demanded accusingly.

“Escritoire? Escritoire?” worried the White Linen Nurse. “Why--why, I’m

afraid I must have mislaid it.”

“Mislaid it?” thundered the Senior Surgeon. “Mislaid it? It weighed

three hundred pounds!”

“Oh, it did?” questioned the White Linen Nurse, with great blue-eyed

interest. Still mulling apparently over the fascinating weight of the

escritoire, she climbed up suddenly into a chair, and with the fluffy,

broom-shaped end of her extraordinarily long braid of hair went angling

wildly off into space after an illusive cobweb.

Faster and faster the Senior Surgeon’s temper began to search for a new

point of exit.

“What do you suppose the servants think of you?” he stormed, “running

round like that, with your hair in a pigtail, like a kid?”

“Servants?” cooed the White Linen Nurse. “Servants?” Very quietly she

jumped down from the chair and came and stood looking up into the

Senior Surgeon’s hectic face. “Why, there aren’t any servants,” she

explained patiently. “I’ve dismissed every one of them. We’re doing our

own work now.”

“Doing ’our own work?’” gasped the Senior Surgeon.

Worriedly the White Linen Nurse stepped back a little.

“Why, wasn’t that right?” she pleaded. “Wasn’t it _right_? Why, I

thought people always did their own work when they were first married.”

With sudden apprehensiveness she glanced round over her shoulder at

the hall clock, and, darting out through a side door, returned almost

instantly with a fierce-looking knife.

[Illustration: Color-Tone, engraved for ~The Century~ by H. C.

Merrill and H. Davidson

“‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?’ HE FAIRLY SCREAMED AT HER. ‘JUST KEEPING

YOU COMPANY, SIR,’ YAWNED THE WHITE LINEN NURSE”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER]

“I’m so late now, and everything,” she confided, “could you peel the

potatoes for me?”

“No, I couldn’t,” said the Senior Surgeon, shortly. Equally shortly he

turned on his heel, and, reaching out once more for his rod-case and

grip, went on up the stairs to his own room.

One of the pleasantest things about arriving home very late in the

afternoon is the excuse it gives you for loafing in your own room while

other people are getting supper. No existent domestic sound in the

whole twenty-four hours is as soothing at the end of a long journey as

the sound of _other_ people getting supper.

Stretched out at full length in a big easy-chair by his bedroom window,

with his favorite pipe bubbling rhythmically between his gleaming

white teeth, the Senior Surgeon studied his new “solid-gold bed” and

his new sage-green wall-paper and his new dust-colored rug, to the

faint, far-away accompaniment of soft-thudding feet and a girl’s laugh

and a child’s prattle and the _tink, tink, tinkle_ of glass, china,

silver,--all scurrying consciously to the service of one man, and that

man himself.

Very, very slowly, in that special half-hour an inscrutable little

smile printed itself experimentally across the right-hand corner of the

Senior Surgeon’s upper lip.

While that smile was still in its infancy, he jumped up suddenly and

forced his way across the hall to his dead wife’s room,--the one

ghost-room of his house and his life,--and there, with his hand on the

turning door-knob, tense with reluctance, goose-fleshed with strain,

his breath gasped out of him whether or no with the one word, “Alice!”

And, behold! there was no room there!

Lurching back from the threshold as from the brink of an elevator-well,

the Senior Surgeon found himself staring foolishly into a most

sumptuous linen-closet, tiered like an Aztec cliff with home after home

for pleasant, prosy blankets and gaily fringed towels and cheerful

white sheets reeking most conscientiously of cedar and lavender.

Tiptoeing cautiously into the mystery, he sensed at one astonished,

grateful glance how the change of a partition, the readjustment of a

proportion, had purged like a draft of fresh air the stale gloom of

an ill-favored memory. Yet so inevitable did it suddenly seem for a

linen-closet to be built right there, so inevitable did it suddenly

seem for the child’s meager playroom to be enlarged just there, that

to save his soul he could not estimate whether the happy plan had

originated in a purely practical brain or a purely compassionate heart.

Half proud of the brain, half touched by the heart, he passed on

exploringly through the new playroom out into the hall again.

Quite distinctly now through the aperture of the back stairs the

kitchen voices came wafting up to him.

“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” wailed his Little Girl’s peevish voice, “now

that--that man’s come back again, I suppose we’ll have to eat in the

dining-room all the time!”

“‘That man’ happens to be your darling father,” admonished the White

Linen Nurse’s laughing voice.

“Even so,” wailed the Little Girl, “I love you best.”

“Even so,” laughed the White Linen Nurse, “I love _you_ best.”

“Just the same,” cried the Little Girl, shrilly--“just the same, let’s

put the cream-pitcher ’way up high somewhere, so he can’t step in it.”

As though from a head tilted suddenly backward the White Linen Nurse’s

laugh rang out in joyous abandon.

Impulsively the Senior Surgeon started to grin; then equally

impulsively the grin soured on his lips. So they thought he was

clumsy? Eh? Resentfully he stared down at his hands, those wonderfully

dexterous, yes, ambidexterous, hands that were the aching envy of all

his colleagues. Interruptingly as he stared, the voice of the young

Wall-Paper Man rose buoyantly from the lower hallway.

“Supper’s all ready, sir!” came the clear, cordial summons.

For some inexplainable reason, at that particular moment almost nothing

in the world could have irritated the Senior Surgeon more keenly than

to be invited to his own supper, in his own house, by a stranger.

Fuming with a new sense of injury and injustice, he started heavily

down the stairs to the dining-room.

Standing patiently behind the Senior Surgeon’s chair with a laudable

desire to assist his carving in any possible emergency that might

occur, the White Linen Nurse experienced her first direct marital

rebuff.

“What do you think this is, an autopsy?” demanded the Senior Surgeon,

tartly. “For Heaven’s sake, go and sit down!”

Quite meekly the White Linen Nurse subsided into her place.

The meal that ensued could hardly have been called a success, though

the room was entrancing, the cloth snow-white, the silver radiant, the

guinea-chicken beyond reproach.

Swept and garnished to an alarming degree, the young Wall-Paper Man

presided over the gravy and did his uttermost, innocent country-best to

make the Senior Surgeon feel perfectly at home.

Conscientiously, as in the presence of a distinguished stranger, the

Little Crippled Girl most palpably from time to time repressed her

insatiable desire to build a towering pyramid out of all the salt-and

pepper-shakers she could reach.

Once when the young Wall-Paper Man forgot himself to the extent of

putting his knife in his mouth, the White Linen Nurse jarred the whole

table with the violence of her warning kick.

Once when the Little Crippled Girl piped out impulsively, “Say, Peach,

what was the name of that bantam your father used to fight against the

minister’s bantam?” the White Linen Nurse choked piteously over her

food.

Twice some one spoke about this year’s weather. Twice some one

volunteered an illuminating remark about last year’s weather. Except

for these four diversions, restraint indescribable hung like a horrid

pall over the feast.

Next to feeling unwelcome in your friend’s house, nothing certainly

is more wretchedly disconcerting than to feel unwelcome in your own

house. Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to grab up all the knives

within reach and ram them successively into his own mouth, just to

prove to the young Wall-Paper Man what a--what a devil of a good fellow

he was himself. Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to tell the White

Linen Nurse about the pet bantam of his own boyhood days, that he bet a

dollar could lick any bantam her father ever dreamed of owning. Grimly

the Senior Surgeon longed to talk dolls, dishes, kittens, yes, even

cream-pitchers, to his little daughter; to talk anything, in fact, to

_any one_; to talk, sing, shout _anything_ that would make him, at

least for the time being, one at heart, one at head, one at table, with

this astonishingly offish bunch of youngsters: but grimly instead, out

of his frazzled nerves, out of his innate spiritual bashfulness, he

merely roared forth, “Where are the potatoes?”

“Potatoes?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “Potatoes? Oh, potatoes?” she

finished more blithely. “Why, yes, of course. Don’t you remember you

didn’t have time to peel them for me? I was _so_ disappointed!”

“You were so disappointed?” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “You? You?”

Janglingly the Little Crippled Girl knelt right up in her chair and

shook her tiny fist right in her father’s face.

“Now, Lendicott Faber,” she screamed, “don’t you start in sassing my

darling little Peach!”

“Peach?” snorted the Senior Surgeon. With almost supernatural calm he

put down his knife and fork and eyed his offspring with an expression

of absolutely inflexible purpose. “Don’t you ever,” he warned

her--“ever, ever, let me hear you call--this woman ‘Peach’ again!”

A trifle faint-heartedly the Little Crippled Girl reached up and

straightened her absurdly diminutive little white cap, and pursed her

little mouth as nearly as possible into an expression of ineffable

peace.

“Why, Lendicott Faber!” she persisted heroically.

“Lendicott!” exclaimed the Senior Surgeon. “What are _you_

‘Lendicotting’ _me_ for?”

Hilariously with her own knife and fork the Little Crippled Girl began

to beat upon the table.

“Why, you dear silly!” she cried--“why, if I’m the new marma, I’ve

_got_ to call you Lendicott, and Peach has _got_ to call you Fat

Father.”

Frenziedly the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair and jumped to his

feet. The expression on his face was neither smile nor frown, nor war

nor peace, nor any other human expression that had ever puckered there

before.

“God!” he said, “this gives me the willies!” and strode tempestuously

from the room.

Out in his own workshop, fortunately, whatever the grotesque new

pinkness, whatever the grotesque new perkiness, his great free

walking-spaces had not been interfered with. Slamming his door

triumphantly behind him, he resumed once more the monotonous pace,

pace, pace that for eighteen years had characterized his first night’s

return to civilization.

Sharply around the corner of his battered old desk the little path

started, wanly along the edge of his dingy book-shelves the little

path furrowed, wistfully at the deep bay-window, where his favorite

lilac-bush budded whitely for his departure, and rusted brownly for his

return, the little path faltered, and went on again, on and on and on,

into the alcove where his instruments glistened, up to the fireplace,

where his college trophy-cups tarnished. Listlessly the Senior Surgeon

began anew his yearly vigil. Up and down, up and down, round and round,

on and on and on, through interminable ducks to unattainable dawns,

a glutted, bacchanalian soul sweating its own way back to sanctity

and leanness. Nerves always were in that vigil--raw, rattling nerves

clamoring vociferously to be repacked in their sedatives. Thirst also

was in that vigil; no mere whimpering tickle of the palate, but a

drought of the tissues, a consuming fire of the bones. Hurt pride was

also there, and festering humiliation.

But more rasping, this particular night, than nerves, more poignant

than thirst, more dangerously excitative even than remorse, hunger

rioted in him--hunger, the one worst enemy of the Senior Surgeon’s

cause, the simple, silly, no-account, gnawing, drink-provocative hunger

of an empty stomach. And one other hunger was also there--a sudden

fierce new lust for life and living, a passion bare of love, yet pure

of wantonness, a passion primitive, protective, inexorably proprietary,

engendered strangely in that one mad, suspicious moment at the edge of

the summer-house when every outraged male instinct in him had leaped to

prove that, love or no love, the woman was his.

Up and down, up and down, round and round, eight o’clock found the

Senior Surgeon still pacing.

At half-past eight the young Wall-Paper Man came to say good-by to him.

“As long as sister won’t be alone any more, I guess I’ll be moving on,”

beamed the Wall-Paper Man. “There’s a dance at home Saturday night,

and I’ve got a girl of my own,” he confided genially.

“Come again,” urged the Senior Surgeon. “Come again when you can stay

longer.” With one honest prayer in stock, and at least two purely

automatic social speeches of this sort, no man needs to flounder

altogether hopelessly for words in any ordinary emergency of life. With

no more mental interruption than the two-minute break in time, the

Senior Surgeon then resumed his bitter-thoughted pacing.

At nine o’clock, however, patrolling his long, rangy book-shelves,

he sensed with a very different feeling through his heavy oak door

the soft, whirring swish of skirts and the breathy twitter of muffled

voices. Faintly to his acute ears came the sound of his little

daughter’s temperish protest, “I won’t! I won’t!” and the White Linen

Nurse’s fervid pleading, “Oh, you must! you must!” and the Little

Girl’s mumbled ultimatum, “Well, I won’t unless _you_ do.”

Irascibly he crossed the room and yanked the door open abruptly upon

their surprise and confusion. His nerves were very sore.

“What in thunder do you want?” he snarled.

Nervously for an instant the White Linen Nurse tugged at the Little

Girl’s hand. Nervously for an instant the Little Girl tugged at the

White Linen Nurse’s hand. Then with a swallow like a sob the White

Linen Nurse lifted her glowing face to his.

“K--kiss us good night!” said the White Linen Nurse.

Telescopically all in that startling second, vision after vision

beat down like blows upon the Senior Surgeon’s senses. The pink,

pink flush of the girl; the lure of her; the amazing sweetness; the

physical docility--oh, ye gods, the docility! Every trend of her

birth, of her youth, of her training, forcing her now, if he chose it,

to unquestioning submission to his will and his judgment! Faster and

faster the temptation surged through his pulses. The path from her lips

to her ear was such a little path; the plea so quick to make, so short,

“I want you _now_!”

“K--kiss us good night!” urged the big girl’s unsuspecting lips. “Kiss

us good night!” mocked the Little Girl’s tremulous echo.

Then explosively, with the noblest rudeness of his life, “No, I won’t!”

said the Senior Surgeon, and slammed the door in their faces.

Falteringly up the stairs he heard the two ascending, speechless with

surprise, perhaps, stunned by his roughness, still hand in hand,

probably, still climbing slowly bedward, the soft, smooth, patient

footfall of the White Linen Nurse and the jerky, laborious _clang,

clang, clang_ of a little dragging, iron-braced leg.

Up and down, round and round, on and on and on, the Senior Surgeon

resumed his pacing. Under his eyes great shadows darkened. Along the

corners of his mouth the lines furrowed like gray scars. Up and down,

round and round, on and on and on and on.

At ten o’clock, sitting bolt upright in her bed, with her worried eyes

straining bluely out across the Little Girl’s somnolent form into

unfathomable darkness, the White Linen Nurse in the throb of her own

heart began to keep pace with that faint, horrid _thud, thud, thud_ in

the room below. Was he passing the bookcase now? Had he reached the

bay-window? Was he dawdling over those glistening scalpels? Would his

nerves remember the flask in that upper desk drawer? Up and down, round

and round, on and on, the harrowing sound continued.

Resolutely at last she scrambled out of her snug nest, and, hurrying

into her great warm, pussy-gray wrapper, began at once very

practically, very unemotionally, with matches and alcohol and a shiny

glass jar, to prepare a huge steaming cup of malted milk. Beefsteak was

vastly better, she knew, or eggs, of course; but if she should venture

forth to the kitchen for real substantials the Senior Surgeon, she felt

quite positive, would almost certainly hear her and stop her. So very

stealthily thus, like the proverbial assassin, she crept down the front

stairs with the innocent malted-milk cup in her hand, and then with her

knuckles just on the verge of rapping against the grimly inhospitable

door, went suddenly paralyzed with uncertainty whether to advance or

retreat.

Once again through the somber, inert wainscoting, exactly as if a soul

had creaked, the Senior Surgeon sensed the threatening, intrusive

presence of an unseen personality. Once again he strode across the

room and jerked the door open with terrifying anger and resentment.

As though frozen there on his threshold by her own bare little feet,

as though strangled there in his doorway by her own great mop of gold

hair, as stolid and dumb as a pink-cheeked graven image, the White

Linen Nurse thrust the cup out awkwardly at him.

Absolutely without comment, as though she trotted on purely

professional business and the case involved was of mutual concern to

them both, the Senior Surgeon took the cup from her hand and closed the

door again in her face.

At eleven o’clock she came again, just as pink, just as blue, just as

gray, just as golden. And the cup of malted milk she brought with her

was just as huge, just as hot, just as steaming, only this time she had

smuggled two raw eggs into it.

Once more the Senior Surgeon took the cup without comment and shut the

door in her face.

At twelve o’clock she came again. The Senior Surgeon was unusually

loquacious this time.

“Have you any more malted milk?” he asked tersely.

“Oh, yes, sir!” beamed the White Linen Nurse.

“Go and get it,” said the Senior Surgeon.

Obediently the White Linen Nurse pattered up the stairs and returned

with the half-depleted bottle. Frankly interested, she recrossed the

threshold of the room and delivered her glass treasure into the hands

of the Senior Surgeon as he stood by his desk. Raising herself to her

tiptoes, she noted with eminent satisfaction that the three big cups on

the other side of the desk had all been drained to their dregs.

Then very bluntly before her eyes the Senior Surgeon took the

malted-milk bottle and poured its remaining contents out quite wantonly

into his waste-basket. Then equally bluntly he took the White Linen

Nurse by the shoulders and marched her out of the room.

“For God’s sake,” he said, “get out of this room, and stay out!”

_Bang!_ the big door slammed behind her. Like a snarling fang, the lock

bit into its catch.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. Even just to herself, all alone

there in the big black hall, she was perfectly polite. “Y-e-s, sir,”

she repeated softly.

With a slightly sardonic grin on his face, the Senior Surgeon resumed

his pacing up and down, round and round, on and on and on.

At one o’clock, in the dull, clammy chill of earliest morning, he

stopped long enough to light his hearthfire. At two o’clock he stopped

again to pile on a trifle more wood. At three o’clock he dallied for an

instant to close a window. The new day seemed strangely cold. At four

o’clock dawn, the wonder, the miracle, the long-despaired-of, quickened

wanly across the east; then suddenly, more like a phosphorescent breeze

than a glow, the pale, pale yellow sunshine came wafting through the

green gloom of the garden. The vigil was over.

Stumbling out into the shadowy hall to greet the new day and the new

beginning, the Senior Surgeon almost tripped and fell over the White

Linen Nurse, sitting all huddled up and drowsy-eyed in a gray little

heap on his outer threshold. The sensation of stepping upon a human

body is not a pleasant one. It smote the Senior Surgeon nauseously

through the nerves of his stomach.

“What are you doing here?” he fairly screamed at her.

“Just keeping you company, sir,” yawned the White Linen Nurse. Before

her hand could reach her mouth again, another great childish yawn

overwhelmed her. “Just--watching with you, sir,” she finished more or

less inarticulately.

“Watching with me?” snarled the Senior Surgeon, resentfully. “Why

should you watch with me?”

Like the frightened flash of a bird the heavy lashes went swooping down

across the pink cheeks and lifted as suddenly again.

“Because you’re my--_man_,” yawned the White Linen Nurse.

Almost roughly the Senior Surgeon reached down and pulled the White

Linen Nurse to her feet.

“God!” said the Senior Surgeon. In his strained, husky voice the word

sounded like an oath. Grotesquely a little smile went scudding zigzag

across his haggard face. With an impulse absolutely alien to him he

reached out abruptly again and raised the White Linen Nurse’s hand to

his lips. “_Good_ God was what I meant--Miss Malgregor,” he grinned a

bit sheepishly.

Quite bruskly then he turned and looked at his watch.

“I’d like my breakfast just as soon now as you can possibly get it,” he

ordered peremptorily, in his own morbid, pathological emergency no more

stopping to consider the White Linen Nurse’s purely normal fatigue than

he in any pathological emergency of hers would have stopped to consider

his own comfort, safety, or, perhaps, even life.

Joyously then like a prisoner just turned loose, he went swinging up

the stairs to recreate himself with a smoke and a shave and a great

splashing, cold shower-bath.

Only one thing seemed really to trouble him now. At the top of the

stairs he stopped for an instant and cocked his head a bit worriedly

toward the drawing-room, where from some slow-brightening alcove

bird-carol after bird-carol went fluting shrilly up into the morning.

“Is that those damned canaries?” he asked briefly.

Very companionably the White Linen Nurse cocked her own towsled head on

one side and listened with him for half a moment.

“Only four of them are damned canaries,” she corrected very gently.

“The fifth one is a parrakeet that I got at a mark-down because it was

a widowed bird and wouldn’t mate again.”

“Eh?” jerked the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse, and started for the kitchen.

No one but the Senior Surgeon himself breakfasted in state at five

o’clock that morning. Snug and safe in her crib up-stairs the Little

Crippled Girl slumbered peacefully on through the general disturbance.

And as for the White Linen Nurse herself, what with chilling and

rechilling melons, and broiling and unbroiling steaks, and making

and remaking coffee, and hunting frantically for a different-sized

water-glass or a prettier-colored plate, there was no time for anything

except an occasional hurried, surreptitious nibble half-way between the

stove and the table.

Yet in all that raucous, early morning hour together neither man

nor girl suffered toward the other the slightest personal sense of

contrition or resentment; for each mind was trained equally fairly,

whether reacting on its own case or another’s, to differentiate pretty

readily between mean nerves and a mean spirit.

Only once, in fact, across the intervening chasm of crankiness did

the Senior Surgeon hurl a smile that was even remotely self-conscious

or conciliatory. Glancing up suddenly from a particularly sharp and

disagreeable speech, he noted the White Linen Nurse’s red lips mumbling

softly one to the other.

“Are you specially--religious, Miss Malgregor?” he grinned quite

abruptly.

“No, not specially, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Why, sir?”

“Oh, it’s only,” grinned the Senior Surgeon, dourly--“it’s only that

every time I’m especially ugly to you, I see your lips moving as though

in ‘silent prayer,’ as they call it; and I was just wondering if there

was any special formula you used with me that kept you so everlastingly

damned serene. Is there?”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“What is it?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, quite bluntly.

“Do I _have_ to tell?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. A little

tremulously in her hand the empty cup she was carrying rattled against

its saucer. “Do I _have_ to tell?” she repeated pleadingly.

A delirious little thrill of power went fluttering through the Senior

Surgeon’s heart.

“Yes, you _have_ to tell me,” he announced quite seriously.

In absolute submission to his demand, though with very palpable

reluctance, the White Linen Nurse came forward to the table, put down

the cup and saucer, and began to finger a trifle nervously at the cloth.

“Oh, I’m sure I didn’t mean any harm, sir,” she stammered; “but all I

say is,--honest and truly all I say is,--’Bah! he’s nothing but a man,

nothing but a man, nothing but a man!’ over and over and over. Just

that, sir.”

Uproariously the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair and jumped to his

feet.

“I guess, after all, I’ll have to let the little kid call you ‘Peach’

one day a week,” he acknowledged jocosely.

With great seriousness then he tossed back his great, splendid head,

shook himself free apparently from all unhappy memories, and started

for his workroom, a great, gorgeously vital, extraordinarily talented,

gray-haired boy, lusting joyously for his own work and play again after

a month’s distressing illness.

From the edge of the hall he turned round and made a really boyish

grimace at her.

“Now, if I only had the horns or the cloven hoof that you think I

have,” he called, “what an easy time I’d make of it, raking over all

the letters and ads. that are stacked up on my desk!”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

Only once did he come back into the kitchen or dining-room for

anything. It was at seven o’clock, and the White Linen Nurse was still

washing dishes.

As radiant as a gray-haired god he towered up in the doorway. The

boyish rejuvenation in him was even more startling than before.

“I’m feeling so much like a fighting-cock this morning,” he said, “I

think I’ll tackle that paper on--that I have to read at Baltimore next

month.” A little startlingly the gray lines furrowed into his cheeks

again. “For Heaven’s sake, see that I’m not disturbed by anything!” he

admonished her warningly.

It must have been almost eight o’clock when the ear-splitting scream

from up-stairs sent the White Linen Nurse plunging out panic-stricken

into the hall.

“Oh, Peach! Peach!” yelled the Little Girl’s frenzied voice, “come

quick and see what Fat Father’s doing _now_, out on the piazza!”

Jerkily the White Linen Nurse swerved off through the French door that

opened directly on the piazza. Had the Senior Surgeon hanged himself,

she tortured, in some wild, temporary aberration of the “morning after”?

But stanchly and reassuringly from the farther end of the piazza the

Senior Surgeon’s broad back belied her horrid terror. Quite prosily

and in apparently perfect health he was standing close to the railing

of the piazza. On a table directly beside him rested four empty

bird-cages. Just at that particular moment he was inordinately busy

releasing the last canary from the fifth cage. Both hands were smouched

with ink, and behind his left ear a fountain-pen dallied daringly.

At the very first sound of the White Linen Nurse’s step the Senior

Surgeon turned and faced her with a sheepish sort of defiance.

“Well, _now_, I imagine,” he said--“well, now I imagine I’ve really

made you mad.”

“No, not mad, sir,” faltered the White Linen Nurse--“no, not mad, sir,

but very far from well.” Coaxingly, with a perfectly futile hand, she

tried to lure one astonished yellow songster back from a swaying yellow

bush. “Why, they’ll die, sir!” she protested. “Savage cats will get

them.”

“It’s a choice of their lives or mine,” said the Senior Surgeon,

tersely.

“Yes, sir,” droned the White Linen Nurse.

Quite snappishly the Senior Surgeon turned upon her.

“For Heaven’s sake, do you think canary-birds are more valuable than I

am?” he demanded stentoriously.

Most disconcertingly before his glowering eyes a great sad, round tear

rolled suddenly down the White Linen Nurse’s flushed cheek.

“N-o-o, not more valuable,” conceded the White Linen Nurse, “but more

c-cunning.”

Up to the roots of the Senior Surgeon’s hair a flush of real contrition

spread hotly.

“Why--Rae,” he stammered, “why, what a beast I am! Why--why--” In

sincere perplexity he began to rack his brains for some adequate

excuse, some adequate explanation. “Why, I’m sure I didn’t mean to make

you feel badly,” he persisted. “Only I’ve lived alone so long that I

suppose I’ve just naturally drifted into the way of having a thing

if I wanted it and--throwing it away if I didn’t. And canary-birds,

now? Well, really--” He began to glower all over again. “Oh, hell!” he

finished abruptly, “I guess I’ll go on down to the hospital, where I

belong!”

A little wistfully the White Linen Nurse stepped forward.

“The hospital?” she said. “Oh, the hospital. Do you think that perhaps

you could come home a little bit earlier than usual to-night, and--and

help me catch just one of the canaries?”

“What?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. Incredulously with a very inky

finger he pointed at his own breast. “What? I?” he demanded. “I? Come

home early from the hospital to help _you_ catch a canary?”

Disgustedly, without further comment, he turned and stalked back again

into the house.

The disgust was still in his walk as he left the house an hour later.

Watching his exit down the long gravel path, the Little Crippled Girl

commented audibly on the matter.

“Peach! Peach!” she called, “what makes Fat Father walk so--surprised?”

People at the hospital also commented upon him.

“Gee!” giggled the new nurses, “we bet he’s a Tartar! But isn’t his

hair cute? And, say, is it really true that that Malgregor girl was

pinned down perfectly helpless under the car and he wouldn’t let

her out till she’d promised to marry him? Isn’t it awful? Isn’t it

romantic?”

“Why, Dr. Faber’s back!” fluttered the old nurses. “Isn’t he wonderful?

Isn’t he beautiful? But, oh, say,” they worried, “what do you suppose

Rae ever finds to talk with him about? Would she ever dare talk

_things_ to him,--just plain every-day things,--hats, and going to the

theater, and what to have for breakfast?” They gasped. “Why, yes, of

course,” they reasoned more sanely. “Steak? Eggs? Even oatmeal? Why,

people had to eat, no matter how wonderful they were. But evenings?”

they speculated more darkly. “But evenings?” In the whole range of

human experience was it even so much as remotely imaginable that,

evenings, the Senior Surgeon and Rae Malgregor sat in the hammock and

held hands? “Oh, gee!” blanched the old nurses.

“Good morning, Dr. Faber,” greeted the Superintendent of Nurses from

behind her austere office desk.

“Good morning, Madam,” said the Senior Surgeon.

“Have you had a pleasant trip?” quizzed the Superintendent of Nurses.

“Exceptionally so, thank you,” said the Senior Surgeon.

“And--Mrs. Faber, is she well?” persisted the Superintendent of Nurses,

conscientiously.

“_Mrs._ Faber?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. “_Mrs._ Faber? Oh, yes; why,

of course. Yes, indeed, she’s extraordinarily well. I never saw her

better.”

“She must have been very lonely without you this past month,” rasped

the Superintendent of Nurses, perfectly polite.

“Yes, she was,” replied the flushed Senior Surgeon. “She--she suffered

keenly.”

“And you, too?” drawled the Superintendent of Nurses. “It must have

been very hard for you.”

“Yes, it was,” replied the Senior Surgeon. “I suffered keenly, too.”

Distractedly he glanced back at the open door. An extraordinarily large

number of nurses, internes, orderlies, seemed to be having errands up

and down the corridor that allowed them a peculiarly generous length of

neck to stretch into the Superintendent’s office.

“Great Heavens!” snapped the Senior Surgeon, “what’s the matter with

everybody this morning?” Tempestuously he started for the door. “Hurry

up my cases, please, Miss Hartzen!” he ordered. “Send them to the

operating-room, and let me get to work.”

At eleven o’clock, absolutely calm, absolutely cool, as pure as a girl

in his white operating-clothes; cleaner, skin, hair, teeth, hands, than

any girl who ever walked the face of the earth, in a white-tiled room

as free from germs as himself, with three or four small glistening

instruments, and half a dozen breathless assistants almost as spotless

as himself, with his sleeves rolled back the whole length of his arms,

and the faintest possible little grin twitching oddly at one corner of

his mouth, he “went in,” as they say, to a new-born baby’s tortured,

twisted spine, and took out fifty years, perhaps, of hunchbacked pain

and shame and morbid passions flourishing banefully in the dark shades

of a disordered life.

At half-past twelve he did an appendix operation on the only son of

his best friend; at one o’clock he did another appendix operation.

Whom it was on didn’t matter; it couldn’t have been worse on any one.

At half-past one no one remembered to feed him. At two, in another

man’s operation, he saw the richest merchant in the city go wafted

out into eternity on the fumes of ether taken for the lancing of a

sty. At three o’clock, passing the open door of one of the public

waiting-rooms, an Italian peasant woman rushed out and spat in his

face because her tubercular daughter had just died at the sanatorium

where the Senior Surgeon’s money had sent her. Only in this one wild,

defiling moment did the lust for alcohol surge up in him again, surge

clamorously, brutally, absolutely mercilessly, as though in all the

world only interminable raw whisky was hot enough to cauterize a

polluted consciousness. At half-past three, as soon as he could change

his clothes again, he rebroke and reset an acrobat’s priceless leg. At

five o’clock, more to rest himself than anything else, he went up to

the autopsy amphitheater to look over an exhibit of enlarged hearts

whose troubles were permanently over.

At six o’clock, just as he was leaving the great building, with all

its harrowing sights, sounds, and smells, a peremptory telephone call

from one of the younger surgeons of the city summoned him back into the

stuffy office again.

“Dr. Faber?”

“Yes.”

“This is Merkley.”

“Yes.”

“Can you come immediately and help me with that fractured-skull case I

was telling you about this morning? We’ll have to trepan right away!”

“Trepan _nothing_!” grunted the Senior Surgeon. “I’ve got to go home

early to-night--and help catch a canary.”

“Catch a what?” gasped the younger surgeon.

“A canary,” grinned the Senior Surgeon, mirthlessly.

“A _what_?” roared the younger man.

“Oh, shut up, you damned fool! Of course I’ll come,” said the Senior

Surgeon.

There was no “boy” left in the Senior Surgeon when he reached home that

night.

Gray with road-travel, haggard with strain and fatigue, it was long,

long after the rosy sunset-time, long, long after the yellow supper

light, that he came dragging up through the sweet-scented dusk of the

garden and threw himself down without greeting of any sort on the top

step of the piazza, where the White Linen Nurse’s skirts glowed

palely through the gloom.

[Illustration: Color-Tone, engraved for ~The Century~ by H. C.

Merrill and H. Davidson

“HE WAS INORDINATELY BUSY RELEASING THE LAST CANARY”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER]

“Well, I put a canary-bird back into its cage for you,” he confided

laconically. “It was a little chap’s soul. It sure would have gotten

away before morning.”

“Who was the man that tried to turn it loose _this_ time?” asked the

White Linen Nurse.

“I didn’t _say_ that anybody did,” growled the Senior Surgeon.

“Oh,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Oh.” Quite palpably a little shiver

of flesh and starch went rustling through her. “I’ve had a wonderful

day, too,” she confided softly. “I’ve cleaned the attic and darned nine

pairs of your stockings and bought a sewing-machine and started to make

you a white silk negligée shirt for a surprise.”

“Eh?” jerked out the Senior Surgeon.

The jerk seemed to liberate suddenly the faint vibration of dishes and

the sound of ice knocking lusciously against a glass.

“Oh, have you had any supper, sir?” asked the White Linen Nurse.

With a prodigious sigh the Senior Surgeon threw his head back against

the piazza railing and stretched his legs a little farther out along

the piazza floor.

“Supper?” he groaned. “No; nor dinner, nor breakfast, nor any other

blankety-blank meal as far back as I can remember.” Janglingly

in his voice, fatigue, hunger, nerves, crashed together like the

slammed notes of a piano. “But I wouldn’t move now,” he snarled,

“if all the blankety-blank-blank foods in Christendom were piled

blankety-blank-blank high on all the blankety-blank-blank tables in

this whole blankety-blank-blank house.”

Ecstatically the White Linen Nurse clapped her hands.

“Oh, that’s just exactly what I hoped you’d say!” she cried. “’Cause

the supper’s right _here_!”

“Here?” snapped the Senior Surgeon. Tempestuously he began all over

again: “I tell you I wouldn’t lift my little finger if all the

blankety-blank-blank-blank-blank--”

“Oh, goody, then!” said the White Linen Nurse. “’Cause now I can feed

you! I sort of miss fussing with the canary-birds,” she added wistfully.

“Feed me?” roared the Senior Surgeon. Again something started a lump of

ice tinkling faintly in a thin glass. “_Feed_ me?” he began all over

again.

Yet with a fragrant strawberry half as big as a peach held out suddenly

under his nose, just from sheer, irresistible instinct he bit out at

it, and nipped the White Linen Nurse’s finger instead.

“Ouch, sir!” said the White Linen Nurse.

Mumblingly down from an up-stairs window, as from a face flatted

smouchingly against a wire screen, a peremptory summons issued.

“Peach! _Peach!_” called an angry little voice, “if you don’t come to

bed now I’ll--I’ll say my curses instead of my prayers!”

A trifle nervously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her feet.

“Maybe I’d better go,” she said.

“Maybe you had,” said the Senior Surgeon, quite definitely.

At the edge of the threshold the White Linen Nurse turned for an

instant.

“Good night, Dr. Faber,” she whispered.

“Good night, Rae Malgregor--Faber,” said the Senior Surgeon.

“Good night _what_?” gasped the White Linen Nurse.

“Good night, Rae Malgregor--Faber,” repeated the Senior Surgeon.

Clutching at her skirts as though a mouse were after her, the White

Linen Nurse went scuttling up the stairs.

Very late on into the night the Senior Surgeon lay there on his piazza

floor, staring out into his garden. Very companionably from time to

time, like a tame firefly, a little bright spark hovered and glowed

for an instant above the bowl of his pipe. Puff, puff, puff; doze,

doze, doze; throb, throb, throb, on and on and on and on into the

sweet-scented night.

So the days passed, and the nights, and more days, and more

nights--July, August, on and on and on. Strenuous, nerve-racking,

heartbreaking surgical days, broken maritally only by the pleasant,

soft-worded greeting at the gate, or the practical, homely appeal of

good food cooked with heart as well as with hands, or the tingling,

inciting masculine consciousness of there being a woman’s blush in the

house. Strenuous, house-working, child-nursing, home-making domestic

days, broken maritally only by the jaded, harsh word at the gate,

the explosive criticism of food, the deadening depressing feminine

consciousness of there being a man’s vicious temper in the house.

Now and again, in one big automobile or another, the White Linen Nurse

and the Senior Surgeon rode out together, always and forever with the

Little Crippled Girl sitting between them, the other woman’s little

crippled girl. Now and again in the late summer afternoons the White

Linen Nurse and the Senior Surgeon strolled together through the

rainbow-colored garden, always and forever with the Little Crippled

Girl, the other woman’s little crippled girl, tagging close behind them

with her little sad, clanking leg. Now and again in the long sweet

summer evenings the White Linen Nurse and the Senior Surgeon sat on the

clematis-shadowed porch together, always and forever with the Little

Crippled Girl, the other woman’s little crippled girl, mocking them

querulously from some vague upper window.

Now and again across the mutually ghost-haunted chasm that separated

them flashed the incontrovertible signal of sex and sense, as when a

new interne, grossly bungling, stood at the hospital window with a

colleague to watch the Senior Surgeon’s car roll away as usual with its

two feminine passengers.

“What makes the chief so stingy with that big handsome girl of his?”

queried the new interne a bit resentfully. “He won’t ever bring her

into the hospital, won’t ever ask any of us young chaps out to his

house, and some of us come mighty near to being eligible, too. Who’s

he saving her for, anyway? A saint? A miracle-worker? A millionaire

medicine-man? They don’t exist, you know.”

“I’m saving her for myself,” snapped the Senior Surgeon, most

disconcertingly from the doorway. “She--she happens to be my wife, not

my daughter, thank you.” He hurried home that night as rattled as a

boy, with a big bunch of new magazines and a box of candy as large as

his head tucked courtingly under his arm.

Now and again across the chasm that separated them flashed the

incontrovertible signal of mutual trust and appreciation, as when once,

after a particularly violent vocal outburst on the Senior Surgeon’s

part, he sobered down very suddenly and said:

“Rae Malgregor, do you realize that in all the weeks we’ve been

together you’ve never once nagged me about my swearing? Not a word, not

a single word!”

“I’m not very used to--words,” smiled the White Linen Nurse, a bit

faintly. “All I know how to nag with is--is raw eggs. If we could only

get those nerves of yours padded just once, sir!”

In August the Senior Surgeon suggested sincerely that the house was

much too big for the White Linen Nurse to run all alone, but conceded

equally sincerely, under the White Linen Nurse’s vehement protest,

that servants, particularly new servants, _did_ creak considerably

round a house, and that maybe “just for the present” at least, until he

finished the very nervous paper he was working on--perhaps it would be

better to stay “just by ourselves.”

In September the White Linen Nurse wanted very much to go home to Nova

Scotia to her sister’s wedding, but the Senior Surgeon was trying a

very complicated and worrisome new brace on the Little Girl’s leg, and

it didn’t seem quite kind to go. In October she planned her trip all

over again. She was going to take the Little Crippled Girl with her

this time. But with their trunks already packed and waiting in the

hall, the Senior Surgeon came home from the hospital with a septic

finger, and it didn’t seem quite best to leave him.

“Well, how do you like being married _now_?” asked the Senior Surgeon,

a bit ironically in his workroom that night, after the White Linen

Nurse had stood for an hour with evil-smelling washes and interminable

bandages, trying to fix that finger the precise, particular way that

he thought it ought to be fixed. “Well, how do you like being married

_now_?” he insisted trenchantly.

“Oh, I like it all right, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. A little

bit wanly this time she smiled her pluck up into the Senior Surgeon’s

questioning face. “Oh, I like it all right, sir. Oh, of course, sir,”

she confided thoughtfully--“oh, of course, sir, it isn’t quite as fancy

as being engaged, or quite as free and easy as being single; but,

still,” she admitted with desperate honesty--“but, still, there’s a

sort of--a sort of a combination importance and--and comfort about it,

sir, like a--like a velvet suit--the second year, sir.”

“Is that all?” quizzed the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

“That’s all so far, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

In November the White Linen Nurse caught a bit of cold that pulled her

down a little. But the Senior Surgeon didn’t notice it specially among

all the virulent ills he lived and worked with from day to day. And

then when the cold disappeared, Indian summer came like a reeking sweat

after a chill. And the house _was_ big, and the Little Crippled Girl

_was_ pretty difficult to manage now and then, and the Senior Surgeon,

no matter how hard he tried not to, did succeed somehow in creating

more or less of a disturbance at least every other day or two.

And then suddenly, one balmy, gold-and-crimson Indian summer morning,

standing out on the piazza trying to hear what the Little Crippled Girl

was calling from the window and what the Senior Surgeon was calling

from the gate, the White Linen Nurse fell right down in her tracks,

brutally, bulkily, like a worn-out horse, and lay, as she fell, a

huddled white blot across the gray piazza.

“Oh, Father, come quick! Come quick! Peach has deaded herself!” yelled

the Little Girl’s frantic voice.

Just with his foot on the step of his car the Senior Surgeon heard

the cry and came speeding back up the long walk. Already there before

him the Little Girl knelt, raining passionate, agonized kisses on her

beloved playmate’s ghastly white face.

“Leave her alone!” thundered the Senior Surgeon. “Leave her alone, I

say!”

Bruskly he pushed the Little Girl aside, and knelt to cradle his own

ear against the White Linen Nurse’s heart.

“Oh, it’s all right,” he growled, and gathered the White Linen

Nurse right up in his arms--she was startlingly lighter than he had

supposed--and carried her up the stairs and put her to bed like a child

in the great sumptuous guest-room, in a great sumptuous nest of all the

best linens and blankets, with the Little Crippled Girl superintending

the task with many hysterical suggestions and sharp, staccato

interruptions. For once in his life the Senior Surgeon did not stop to

quarrel with his daughter.

Rallying limply from her swoon, the White Linen Nurse at last stared

out with hazy perplexity from her dimpling white pillows to see the

Senior Surgeon standing amazingly at the guest-room bureau with a

glass and a medicine-dropper in his hand, and the Little Crippled Girl

hanging apparently by her narrow, peaked chin across the foot-board of

the bed.

Gazing down worriedly at the lace-ruffled sleeve of her night-dress,

the White Linen Nurse made her first public speech to the world at

large.

“Who put me to bed?” whispered the White Linen Nurse.

Ecstatically the Little Crippled Girl began to pound her fists on the

foot-board of the bed.

“Father did!” she cried in unmistakable triumph. “All the little hooks,

all the little buttons! wasn’t it cunning?”

The Senior Surgeon would hardly have been human if he hadn’t glanced

back suddenly over his shoulder at the White Linen Nurse’s quickly

changing color. Quite irrepressibly, as he saw the red blood come

surging home again into her cheeks, a short, chuckling little laugh

escaped him.

“I guess you’ll live now,” he remarked dryly.

Then because a Senior Surgeon can’t stay home on the mere impulse of

the moment from a great rushing hospital just because one member of

his household happens to faint perfectly innocently in the morning, he

hurried on to his work again, and saved a little boy, and lost a little

girl, and mended a fractured thigh, and eased a gunshot wound, and came

dashing home at noon in one of his thousand-dollar hours to feel the

White Linen Nurse’s pulse and broil her a bit of tenderloin steak with

his own thousand-dollar hands; and then went dashing off again to do

one major operation or another, telephoned home once or twice during

the afternoon to make sure that everything was all right, and, finding

that the White Linen Nurse was comfortably up and about again, went

sprinting off fifty miles somewhere on a meningitis consultation, and

came dragging home at last, somewhere near midnight, to a big, black

house brightened only by a single light in the kitchen, where the

White Linen Nurse went tiptoeing softly from stove to pantry in deft

preparation of an appetizing supper for him.

Quite roughly again, without smile or appreciation, the Senior Surgeon

took her by the shoulders and turned her out of the kitchen and started

her up the stairs.

“Are you an idiot?” he said. “Are you an imbecile?” he came back and

called up the stairs to her just as she was disappearing from the upper

landing. Then up and down, round and round, on and on and on, the

Senior Surgeon began suddenly to pace again.

Only, for some unexplainable reason to the White Linen Nurse up-stairs,

his workroom didn’t seem quite large enough for his pacing this night.

Along the broad piazza she heard his footsteps creak. Far, far into

the morning, lying warm and snug in her own little bed, she heard his

footsteps crackling through the wet-leafed garden paths.

Yet the Senior Surgeon didn’t look an atom jaded or forlorn when he

came down to breakfast the next morning. He had on a brand-new gray

suit that fitted his big, powerful shoulders to perfection, and the

glad glow of his shower-bath was still reddening faintly in his cheeks

as he swung around the corner of the table and dropped down into his

place, with an odd little grin on his lips directed intermittently

toward the White Linen Nurse and the Little Crippled Girl, who already

waited him there at each end of the table.

“Oh, Father, _isn’t_ it lovely to have my darling, darling Peach all

well again!” beamed the Little Crippled Girl, with unusual friendliness.

“Speaking of your ’darling Peach,’” said the Senior Surgeon,

abruptly--“speaking of your ‘darling Peach,’ I’m going to take her away

with me to-day for a week or so.”

“Eh?” exclaimed the Little Crippled Girl.

“What? What, sir?” stammered the White Linen Nurse.

Quite prosily the Senior Surgeon began to butter a piece of toast;

but the little twinkle about his eyes belied in some way the utter

prosiness of the act.

“For a little trip,” he confided amiably, “a little holiday.”

A trifle excitedly the White Linen Nurse laid down her knife and fork

and stared at him as blue-eyed and wondering as a child.

“A holiday?” she gasped. “To a--_beach_, you mean? Would there be a--a

roller-coaster? I’ve never seen a roller-coaster.”

“Eh?” laughed the Senior Surgeon.

“Oh, I’m going, too! I’m going, too!” piped the Little Crippled Girl.

Most jerkily the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair from the table,

and swallowed half a cup of coffee at one single gulp.

“Going _three_, you mean?” he glowered at his little daughter. “Going

_three_?” His comment that ensued was distinctly rough as far as

diction was concerned, but the facial expression of ineffable peace

that accompanied it would have made almost any phrase sound like a

benediction. “Not by a damned sight!” beamed the Senior Surgeon. “This

little trip is just for Peach and me.”

“But, sir--” fluttered the White Linen Nurse. Her face was suddenly

pinker than any rose that ever bloomed.

With an impulse absolutely novel to him, the Senior Surgeon turned and

swung his little daughter very gently to his shoulder.

“Your Aunt Agnes is coming to stay with _you_ in just about ten

minutes,” he affirmed. “That’s what’s going to happen to _you_. And

maybe there’ll be a pony--a white pony.”

“But Peach is so--pleasant!” wailed the Little Crippled Girl. “Peach is

so pleasant!” she began to scream and kick.

“So it seems,” growled the Senior Surgeon; “and she’s--dying of it.”

Tearfully the Little Girl wriggled down to the ground, and hobbled

around and thrust her finger-tip into the White Linen Nurse’s blushiest

cheek.

“I don’t want Peach to die,” she admitted worriedly; “but I don’t want

anybody to take her away.”

“The pony is very white,” urged the Senior Surgeon with a diplomacy

quite alien to him.

Abruptly the Little Girl turned and faced him.

“What color is Aunt Agnes?” she asked vehemently.

“Aunt Agnes is pretty white, too,” declared the Senior Surgeon.

With the faintest possible tinge of superciliousness the Little Girl

lifted her sharp chin a trifle higher.

“If it’s just a perfectly plain white pony,” she said, “I’d rather

have Peach. But if it’s a white pony with black blots on it, and if

it can pull a little cart, and if I can whip it with a little switch,

and if it will eat sugar lumps out of my hand, and if its name is--is

’Beautiful, Pretty Thing--’”

“Its name has always been ‘Beautiful, Pretty Thing,’ I’m quite sure,”

insisted the Senior Surgeon. Inadvertently as he spoke he reached out

and put a hand very lightly on the White Linen Nurse’s shoulder.

Instantly into the Little Girl’s suspicious face flushed a furiously

uncontrollable flame of jealousy and resentment. Madly she turned upon

her father.

“You’re a liar!” she screamed. “There _is_ no white pony! You’re a

robber! You’re a--a--drunk! You sha’n’t have my darling Peach!” She

threw herself frenziedly into the White Linen Nurse’s lap.

Impatiently the Senior Surgeon disentangled the clinging little arms,

and, raising the White Linen Nurse to her feet, pushed her gently

toward the hall.

“Go to my workroom,” he said. “Quickly! I want to talk with you.”

A moment later he joined her there, and shut and locked the door behind

him. The previous night’s loss of sleep showed plainly in his face now,

and the hospital strain of the day before, and of the day before that,

and of the day before that.

Heavily, moodily, he crossed the room and threw himself down in his

desk chair, with the White Linen Nurse still standing before him as

though she were nothing but a white linen nurse. All the splendor was

suddenly gone from him, all the radiance, all the exultant purpose.

“Well, Rae Malgregor,” he grinned mirthlessly, “the little kid is

right, though I certainly don’t know where she got her information. I

_am_ a liar. The pony’s name is not yet ’Beautiful, Pretty Thing’! I

_am_ a drunk. I was drunk most of June. I _am_ a robber. I have taken

you out of your youth and the love chances of your youth, and shut you

up here in this great, gloomy old house of mine, to be my slave and my

child’s slave and--”

“Pouf!” said the White Linen Nurse. “It would seem silly now, sir, to

marry a boy.”

“And I’ve been a beast to you,” persisted the Senior Surgeon. “From the

very first day you belonged to me I’ve been a beast to you, venting

brutally on your youth, on your sweetness, on your patience, all the

work, the worry, the wear and tear, the abnormal strain and stress of

my disordered days and years; and I’ve let my little girl vent also

on you all the pang and pain of _her_ disordered days. And because in

this great, gloomy, racketty house it seemed suddenly like a miracle

from heaven to have service that was soft-footed, gentle-handed,

pleasant-hearted, I’ve let you shoulder all the hideous drudgery, the

care, one horrid homely task after another piling up, up, up, till you

dropped in your tracks yesterday, still smiling!”

“But I got a good deal out of it, even so, sir!” protested the White

Linen Nurse. “See, sir!” she smiled. “I’ve got real lines in my face

now, like other women. I’m not a doll any more. I’m not a--”

“Yes,” groaned the Senior Surgeon; “and I might just as kindly have

carved those lines with my knife. But I was going to make it all up to

you to-day,” he hurried. “I swear I was! Even in one short little week

I could have done it, you wouldn’t have known me, I was going to take

you away--just you and me. I would have been a saint. I swear I would!

I would have given you such a great, wonderful, child-hearted holiday

as you never dreamed of in all your unselfish life--a holiday all you,

you, you! You could have dug in the sand if you’d wanted to. God! I’d

have dug in the sand if you’d wanted me to. And now it’s all gone from

me, all the will, all the sheer, positive self-assurance that I could

have carried the thing through absolutely selflessly. That little

girl’s sneering taunt, the ghost of her mother in that taunt--God! when

anybody knocks you just in your decency, it doesn’t harm you specially;

but when they knock you in your wanting-to-be-decent, it--it undermines

you somewhere. I don’t know exactly how. I’m nothing but a man again

now, just a plain, everyday, greedy, covetous, physical man on the

edge of a holiday, the first clean holiday in twenty years, that he no

longer dares to take!”

A little swayingly the White Linen Nurse shifted her standing weight

from one foot to the other.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. “I’d like to have seen a

roller-coaster, sir.”

Just for an instant a gleam of laughter went scudding zigzag across the

Senior Surgeon’s brooding face, and was gone again.

“Rae Malgregor, come here!” he ordered quite sharply.

Very softly, very glidingly, like the footfall of a person who has

never known heels, the White Linen Nurse came forward swiftly, and,

sliding in cautiously between the Senior Surgeon and his desk, stood

there, with her back braced against the desk, her fingers straying

idly up and down the edges of the desk, staring up into his face, all

readiness, all attention, like a soldier waiting further orders.

So near was she that he could almost hear the velvet heart-throb of

her, the little fluttering swallow, yet by some strange, persistent

aloofness of her, some determinate virginity, not a fold of her gown,

not an edge, not a thread, seemed even to so much as graze his knee,

seemed even to so much as shadow his hand, lest it short-circuit

thereby the seething currents of their variant emotions.

With extraordinary intentness for a moment the Senior Surgeon sat

staring into the girl’s eyes, the blue eyes too full of childish

questioning yet to flinch with either consciousness or embarrassment.

“After all, Rae Malgregor,” he smiled at last, faintly--“after all, Rae

Malgregor, Heaven knows when I shall ever get another holiday.”

“Yes, sir?” said the White Linen Nurse.

With apparent irrelevance he reached for his ivory paper-cutter and

began bending it dangerously between his adept fingers.

“How long have you been with me, Rae Malgregor?” he asked abruptly.

“Four months--actually with you, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“Do you happen to remember the exact phrasing of my--proposal of

marriage to you?” he asked shrewdly.

“Oh, yes, sir!” said the White Linen Nurse. “You called it ’general

heartwork for a family of two.’”

A little grimly before her steady gaze the Senior Surgeon’s own eyes

fell, and rallied again almost instantly with a gaze as even and direct

as hers.

“Well,” he smiled, “through the whole four months I seem to have kept

my part of the contract all right, and held you merely as a drudge in

my home. Have you, then, decided once and for all time, whether you are

going to stay on with us or whether you will ‘give notice,’ as other

drudges have done?”

With a little backward droop of one shoulder the White Linen Nurse

began to finger nervously at the desk behind her, and turning half-way

round, as though to estimate what damage she was doing, exposed thus

merely the profile of her pink face, of her white throat, to the Senior

Surgeon’s questioning eyes.