Without arguing, he took the chair. She remained standing.
The condition of George startled him. Evidently the boy was in a heavy
stupor. His body was so feverish that it seemed to give off a
perceptible heat. There was no need to touch the skin in order to know
that it burned: one divined this. The hair was damp. About the pale
lips an irregular rash had formed, purplish, patchy, and the rash seemed
to be the mark and sign of some strange dreadful disease that nobody had
ever named: a plague. Worse than all this was the profound,
comprehensive discomfort of the whole organism, showing itself in the
unnatural pose of the limbs, and in multitudinous faint instinctive ways
of the inert but complaining body. And the child was so slight beneath
the blanket, so young, so helpless, spiritually so alone. How could
even Hilda communicate her sympathy to that spirit, withdrawn and
inaccessible? During the illness of his father Edwin had thought that
he was looking upon the extreme tragic limit of pathos, but this present
spectacle tightened more painfully the heart. It was more shameful: a
more excruciating accusation against the order of the universe. To
think of George in his pride, strong, capricious, and dominant, while
gazing at this victim of malady ... the contrast was intolerable!
George was very ill. And yet Hilda, despite the violence of her nature,
could stand there calm, sweet, and controlled. What power! Edwin was
humbled. "This is the sort of thing that women of her sort can do," he
said to himself. "Why, Maggie and I are simply nothing to her!" Maggie
and he could be self-possessed in a crisis; they could stand a strain;
but the strain would show itself either in a tense harshness, or in some
unnatural lightness, or even flippancy. Hilda was the very image of
soft caressing sweetness. He felt that he must emulate her.
"Surely his temperature's gone up?" he said quietly.
"Yes," Hilda replied, fingering absently the clinical thermometer that
with a lot of other gear lay on the table. "It's nearly 105. It can't
last like this. It won't. I've been through it with him before, but
not quite so bad."
"I didn't think anyone could have influenza twice, so soon," Edwin
murmured.
"Neither did I," said she. "Still, he must have been sickening for it
before he came down here." There was a pause. She wiped the boy's
forehead. "This change has come on quite suddenly," she said, in a
different voice. "Two hours ago--less than two hours ago--there was
scarcely a sign of that rash."
"What is it?"
"Charlie says it's nothing particular."
"What's Charlie gone for?"
"I don't know." She shook her head; then smiled. "_Isn't_ it a good
thing I brought him?"
Indubitably it was. Her caprice, characterised as preposterous by
males, had been justified. Thus chance often justifies women, setting
at naught the high priests of reason.
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