Then I went to bed and had a chill. And that's how a whole day was spent from half-past eight in the morning until half-past twelve at night.
The next morning I woke up with a very bad sore throat and a stiff neck and pains all over. Duggie and Berri made me send for a doctor, and signed off for me at the office. I can't imagine how I caught cold, unless, perhaps, it was from wearing that wet shirt.
IX
I was very sick for about three days, and just sick for three or four days more. When Berri signed off for me at the office, the college doctor bustled around to my room at noon to see what was the matter. His motives in doing this are somewhat mixed, I believe. He has not only the health but the veracity of the undergraduate very much at heart. If you are laid up, of course he has to know about it; and if you are n't well enough to attend lectures but manage with a heroic effort to go skating,—well, he likes to know about that too.
"Of course you haven't measles," Duggie said when he came in a few minutes after Dr. Tush had gone, "but equally, of course, he said you had,—did n't he?"
"Yes, he did," I answered dismally; for he had told me this at considerable length, and I remembered that measles a good many years before had almost been the end of me.
"Well, that's a relief," Duggie went on cheerfully. "You may have all sorts of things, but it's a cinch that you have n't measles. Tush is a conservative old soul; he always gambles on measles, and of course every now and then he wins. It pleases him immensely. He usually celebrates his success by writing a paper on 'The University's Health,' and getting it printed in the Graduates' Magazine."
When the other doctor—the real one—came, he found that I was threatened with pneumonia.
Oh, I had a perfectly miserable time of it at first. The feeling dreadfully all over and not being able to breathe was bad enough, but I think the far-away-from-homeness and the worrying about mamma were worse. I was afraid all the time that she would hear (although I could n't imagine how that would be possible), and then in the middle of the night I lay awake hoping and praying that she would hear and leave for Cambridge by the next train. I don't suppose I realized just then how wonderfully good Duggie and Berri and Mrs. Chester were to me. Duggie and Berri took turns in sitting up all night and putting flannel soaked in hot mustard-water on my chest (ugh! how I loathe the smell of mustard), and when they had to go to lectures during the day,—I think, as a matter of fact, they cut a great many of them,—Mrs. Chester would come in and hem endless dish-cloths by the window. Berri says that he ceased to worry about me from the time I looked over at Mrs. Chester after about half an hour's silence and exclaimed,—
"Sew some more with the crisscross pattern; I 'm tired of those dingy white ones."