"You weren't up to your usual form," was his comment. "What's the matter?"
"A sick friend."
I started another story at once, one I had already planned, about a man who was to build a string of gorgeous opera houses in the leading American cities. This story, too, went slowly. Joe Kramer's voice kept breaking in. From time to time as I struggled on I could feel Eleanore watching me.
"Don't try to hurry it," she said. "We can always borrow from father, you know—and besides, I'm going to cut our expenses."
She was as good as her word. She dismissed the nurse, and through the last weeks of delirium and the first of returning consciousness she placed herself in Joe's borderland as the one whose presence he vaguely felt pulling him back into comfort and strength.
"No, don't talk," I heard her say to him one evening. "I don't want to hear you. All I want is to get you well. That's the only thing you and I have to talk of."
But having so thrown him off his guard, as his mind grew clearer she began cautiously drawing him out, despite his awakening hostility to this woman who had made me a success. From my room I heard snatches of their talk. She surprised J. K. by the intimate bits of knowledge about him that she had collected both from me and from his own sick ramblings. She had just enough of his point of view to rouse him from his indifference, to annoy him by her mistakes and her refusals to understand. I remember one afternoon when I went in to sit with him, his staring grimly up at my face and saying:
"Bill, that wife of yours is such a born success she scares me. Everything she touches, everything she brings me to drink, everything she does to this bed, is one thundering success. And she won't listen to anything but success. Your case is absolutely hopeless."
They became grim enemies, and both of them enjoyed it. She let our small son come and sit by the bed. The Indian promptly worshiped Joe as the "longest" man he had ever seen, and they became boon companions.
"It's pathetic," Eleanore told me, "the little things that appeal to him here. Poor boy, he has forgotten what a decent home is like."