FullReads

“Then you’re not an invalid? I thought you were in pain and couldn’t reach the bell. That’s the reason I looked in.”

“Oh, dear, no, I was only yawning! I came for what Laura calls the healing influence of solitude, but Laura thought as the place was so expensive, and treatment was included, we’d better take Turkish baths, massage, and electricity, they’re so good for the complexion. I have a little table to myself in the convalescents’ dining-room and haven’t made any acquaintances. I can’t stand their sweetbread complexions and their double chins. The patients are all so fat they might sing Isaac Watts’ hymn in unison: ‘Much of my time has run to waist.'”

“It is not an inspiring assemblage,” I agreed, “though I haven’t seen them all together, as you have.”

“And they think of nothing but themselves, which is exactly what I want to think about–myself, I mean. There’s one charming girl on this floor. Something’s the matter with her solar plexus and they won’t allow her to talk, so we have had some nice conversations in the silent hour. They’ve told me now I mustn’t call again; it seems that I was too exciting. Tell me something about yourself, Vashti–I am sure that’s your name, or Semiramis or Zenobia or Judith, and if it isn’t one or another of those I don’t want to hear what it is, for you wouldn’t look like it.”

Just here a page brought in a letter which she glanced through with an “Excuse me, please.”

“Oh, dear! Now Laura can’t come to-morrow! She is certainly the most unfortunate being in the universe. She became very much interested in a deaf man that she met in her settlement work, and so as to give the poor thing employment she appointed him Superintendent of the Working Boys’ Club. Now the working boys refuse to play with him and the directors have had a meeting asking Laura to remove him at once. I do think they might have endured him one season when I gave him a twenty-dollar ear-trumpet, but some people are utterly unreasonable; and here I am, in need of advice every moment, and Laura kept in the city!”

“Haven’t you any family?”

“Not a soul; have you?”

“No one but a cousin.”

“I believe nobody nice and interesting has a family nowadays. Laura has no one but an uncongenial stepmother, and that is the reason we are so intimate. I am so giddy and frivolous, and Laura is so noble and self-sacrificing that I try to form myself on her now and then, when I’m not too busy.”

“You live with her, do you?”

“Oh, no! I don’t live anywhere in particular. Of course I have a house and a lady housekeeper, but she doesn’t count. I’ve been staying mostly with a Mrs. Beckett, an old friend of my mother’s. She is the dearest and loveliest woman in the world and I can’t bear to be away from her.”

“Why can’t she join forces with you if you are so alone in the world?”

“Because there’s a son.”

“Is he too young, or too old, to join forces?”

“No, he’s just right, and he’d be only too glad to join forces, or anything else that had me in it, but he mustn’t, and that’s the reason Laura made me come here!” And with this she punched the sofa-pillows rebelliously, looking more like an enraged Angora kitten than anything else.

“It’s your hour for cold spray,” said Jimmy, the page-boy, peeping in at the crack of the door.

“I’ll come!” she responded unwillingly. “Now do steal in again,” she whispered, turning to me, “for I must talk to somebody, and if Laura could see you I know she would think you safer than anybody here.”

That afternoon, as I swung in my hammock in the grove below the sanitarium, I looked up at its three stories of height and its rows upon rows of windows, and wondered how many cases of neurasthenia under its roof were traceable to a conflict between love and conscience. “I begin to have an interest in that chatterbox neighbor of mine,” I thought drowsily, “and that, after vowing not to make an acquaintance in this place. Love will be a side dish, not the roast, in her bill of fare, if I am any judge of character, and why does her Laura attempt to stem the natural tide of events? It is almost wicked of the Fates to give such a featherhead any problems to solve; she ought to have her what’s-his-name, Beckett, if she wants him, particularly if he wants her. As for the noble Laura, I long to make her acquaintance. I can almost hear the uncongenial stepmother, the feverish cook, and the infuriated directors, clamoring for a providence to remove her from their field of vision, and substitute some thoroughly practical and ignoble person in her stead.”