I don’t want to get well,
I’m in love with a beautiful nurse!”
The young man heeded neither the humming nor the remark about his unfortunate importance. He frowned, looking anxiously at his watch on the table beside his couch. “I wonder what’s keeping her,” he said, peevishly. “She said she’d be here with a book to read to me. When anybody does to another person what she did to me, I think the least they can do is to be punctual, especially when they’ve promised they would.”
She of whom he complained was not far away, however. At that moment she had just been greeted and detained by two girl friends of hers who encountered her in the park on her way to the hospital. Their manner did not please her.
“Lill-lee!” they shouted from the distance, at sight of her. They whistled shrilly, and, as she looked toward them, they waved their arms at her; then came running, visibly excited and audibly uproarious.
They seemed to be bursting with laughter; yet when they reached her, what they said was only, “Where you going, Lily?” And before she replied, they clutched each other, perishing of their mutual jocularity. From the first, Lily did not like their laughter;—it had not the sound of true mirth, but was the kind of mere vocal noise that hints of girlish malice.
She looked at them disapprovingly. “I’m going to the hospital,” she said with some primness. “What’s so funny?”
“What you going to do at the hospital, Lily?”
“Read to Mr. McArdle,” she replied. “He’s better and——”
But their immediate uproar cut her short. They clung together, shrieking. “That’s not your fault, is it, Lily?” one of them became coherent enough to inquire, whereupon they both doubled themselves, rocked, gurgled, screamed, and clung again.