"Isn't what restful?" glowered the Senior Surgeon.
"Sitting down!" said the White Linen Nurse.
Contemptuously the Senior Surgeon's mind ignored the interruption and reverted precipitously to its own immediate problem concerning the gloomy, black-walnut shadowed entrance hall of his great house, and how many yards of imported linoleum at $3.45 a yard it would take to recarpet the "damned hole,"—and how it would have seemed anyway if—if he hadn't gone home—as usual to the horrid black-walnut shadows that night—but been carried home instead—feet first and—quite dead—dead, mind you, with a red necktie on,—and even the cook was out! And they wouldn't even know where to lay him—but might put him by mistake in that—in that—in his dead wife's dead—bed!
Altogether unconsciously a little fluttering sigh of ineffable contentment escaped the White Linen Nurse.
"I don't care how long we have to sit here and wait for help," she announced cheerfully, "because to-morrow, of course, I'll have to get up and begin all over again—and go to Nova Scotia."
"Go where?" lurched the Senior Surgeon.
"I'd thank you kindly, sir, not to jerk my skirt quite so hard!" said the White Linen Nurse just a trifle stiffly.
Incredulously once more the Senior Surgeon withdrew his detaining hand. "I'm not even touching your skirt!" he denied desperately. Nothing but denial and reiterated denial seemed to ease his self-esteem for an instant. "Why, for Heaven's sake, should I want to hold on to your skirt?" he demanded peremptorily. "What the deuce—?" he began blusteringly. "Why in—?"
Then abruptly he stopped and shot an odd, puzzled glance at the White Linen Nurse, and right there before her startled eyes she saw every vestige of human expression fade out of his face as it faded out sometimes in the operating-room when in the midst of some ghastly, unforeseen emergency that left all his assistants blinking helplessly around them, his whole wonderful scientific mind seemed to break up like some chemical compound into all its meek component parts,—only to reorganize itself suddenly with some amazing explosive action that fairly knocked the breath out of all on-lookers—but was pretty apt to knock the breath into the body of the person most concerned.
When the Senior Surgeon's scientific mind had reorganized itself to meet this emergency he found himself infinitely more surprised at the particular type of explosion that had taken place than any other person could possibly have been.