She was taciturn in the presence of Nicholas and his warm, friendly admiration.
"We both want you to feel that you've got real pals in us—people that you can always turn to, you know. I don't want to think of your going through any more of those lonely times that you were telling me about——"
"It's awfully sweet of you both," said Doris slowly. She looked at Nicholas as she spoke.
His small, tawny eyes expressed all the candid, unsubtle simplicity of his spirit. A hundred times he had looked at Lily herself with just such open, uncritical admiration.
"I think you've a great deal to be proud of, you know," said Nicholas. "There must have been times when you felt pretty nearly down and out, eh?" And Doris again replied:
"Oh, I don't know."
"But I do," said Nicholas, nodding triumphantly.
Lily wondered, with a certain impatience, why Doris did not indulge in one of those lengthy expositions of her own grievances against life, and the hospital, and her father, with which she had so often wearied her patient.
Was she really sufficiently intelligent to realize how very much more effective was this uneloquent refusal to dwell upon the hardships that Nicholas was so evidently ready to accept at her own valuation?
Next morning, however, when the two were again alone together, Doris was quite as voluble as ever and Lily quite as profoundly fatigued by her.