Her mother thought these excitements vulgar. She said if girls must be silly, why not be silly about people in their own class of life? But Lita explained that the boys they knew were not so thrilling. Had her mother, she asked, never bought the picture of an actor? "Never!" said her mother with conviction; but Aunt Minnie, who happened to be there, said, "Nonsense, Alita! You had a picture of Sothern as the Prisoner of Zenda." Mrs. Hazlitt said that she hadn't, and that was entirely different anyhow.
The only result of the conversation was that Mrs. Hazlitt began to suspect Lita of some such ill-bred passion—most unjustly. The whole subject had had merely a theoretical interest for Lita. She was too practical to be fired by these intangible heroes—dream, dead or dramatic.
But now, even that first Sunday, as she stepped out of the infirmary into the bare March moonlight, she found that real life could hold the same thrill for her that dreams did for these others.
"And that," she said to herself, "is where I have the best of it."
II
Lita had developed a technic by which she slept through the rising gong and for the next twenty-five minutes, allowing herself thus exactly five minutes to get up, dress and reach the dining room. But the morning after her friend's operation she woke with the gong, and five minutes later was on her way to the infirmary, first tying her tie and then smoothing down her hair as she went.
As she ran up the stairs of the infirmary, a voice—whose owner must have recognized the almost inaudible patter of her feet—called to her from the small dining room of the cottage. She put her face, flushed with running, round the jamb of the door and saw Doctor Dacer seated at breakfast. The nurse was toasting bread on an electric toaster, and he was spreading a piece, just finished, with a thick crimson jam. "Damson," Lita said to herself.
He looked at her.
"Youth's a great thing," he said.
"So the old are always saying," Lita answered. "But there's a catch in it; they get back at you for being young."