"It was hard luck for Mrs. Mavering to marry you."
"You speak truth."
"You didn't boil down to much."
"Blanked little. What's your intricate meaning?"
"I was thinking of Map."
They did not find them till the next day. There were ten or twelve hospitals in and about the city, some of them in the suburbs and far apart. Certain doctors knew the two nurses, and one directed them to a hospital which turned out to be a kind of military city with streets and sentries; but they were not there. The hospitals were all working smoothly at the time. There had been no large battle since Antietam, and there were few of those grim, dreary, and confused scenes which at times made the hospitals seem sterner battle-fields than any at the front. Nevertheless Mavering felt and expressed a sense of injury.
"You don't mean to say I'm as tough as all this!"
"I haven't said anything about your toughness. Maybe you are. We'll try Mount Pleasant now. That will be the last to-night." And they rode away from the military city.
"You know her," continued Mavering. "She is what you would call, after duly considering the adjective, select. She doesn't like realism, raw humanity, and irregular event. She desires humanity to be cooked and served in courses, even to be ordered up to the rules of art. By which figurative language I mean to say that I don't see, that no ready interpretation presents itself, that I'm interested to know who persuaded her to take a ticket to the suburbs of hell."