“But fever is heat,” mildly asserted the “home-nurse.”
“Oh no, I don’t mean that” said the spinster loftily. “Of course, I know you’re hot with fever; but it’s something in you, isn’t it, that affects the thermometer? It wouldn’t go up, even if I put it on the stove, would it?”
“Put it into the jug and try,” said the Signorina, who did not believe that language would be much use here.
“Oh, I think,” interpolated a summer guest who was much impressed by the spinster’s grasp of the situation, “I’d rather try my thermometer on my cousin, please! I think one would learn better. It would be more like hospital practice, wouldn’t it?”
The spinster turned from the jug with alacrity.
“I’m sure you are right,” she cried. Then wheeling on her neighbour: “Oh, would you mind?” she pleaded.
The neighbour, a tailor-made lady with a walking-stick, who looked on with a twisted smile—we suspect she was a suffragette, pandering to the weakness of a world distracted from the real business of life—submitted to be made useful. Her smile became accentuated.
“Shouldn’t mind if it was a cigarette,” she remarked in a deep bass, and thereafter was silent, while the spinster laboriously prepared to take two minutes on her watch.
“Please, dear child,” cried one of the motor-veiled ladies in her impassioned tone of interest, “will you explain to me again, what is normal? I’d better take it out, dear! There’s no use doing it wrong, is there? You said something about a little red line—or is that for fever? How silly I am—red would be for fever, wouldn’t it? No? Red is normal, darling. Oh, I do hope you’re normal! What did you say, ninety-eight, point four? I never could do arithmetic and I’m so stupid. My husband always says—doesn’t he, Angela?—‘You won’t do much adding up, Birdie’—he calls me ‘Birdie,’—‘but I can trust you to subtract all right,’ dear, naughty fellow! He loves me to spend, you know, doesn’t he, Angela? Oh dear, it hasn’t moved at all! Is that very bad? Angela, darling!”
“But you didn’t leave it in two minutes,” said the persevering teacher. “Supposing you were to put it in your mouth now, and your cousin were to take you?”