I spent some time in explaining the difference between an order and a permission. I used simple illustrations and made my meaning so plain that no one could possibly have missed it. The nurse, instead of admitting that I had convinced her, went out of the room. She came back again with a cupful of beef tea which she offered me with another bright smile. If I were not a man with a very high sense of the courtesy due to women I should have taken the cup and thrown it at her head. It is, I think, very much to my credit that I drank the beef tea and then did nothing worse than turn my face to the wall.
At two o’clock she got my dressing gown and somewhat ostentatiously spread it out on a chair in front of the fire. I lay still and said nothing, though I saw that she still clung to the idea of getting me out of bed. Then she rang the bell and made the red-haired girl bring a dilapidated armchair into the room. She pummelled its cushions with her fists for some time and then put a pillow on it. This showed me that she fully expected to succeed in making me sit up. I was perfectly determined to stay where I was. I pretended to go to sleep and even went the length of snoring in a long-drawn, satisfied kind of way. She came over and looked at me. I very slightly opened the corner of one eye and saw by the expression of her face that she did not believe I was really asleep. I prepared for the final struggle by gripping the bedclothes tightly with both hands and poking my feet between the bars at the bottom of the bed.
At three o’clock she had me seated in the armchair, clothed in my dressing gown, with a rug wrapped round my legs. I was tingling with suppressed rage and flushed with a feeling of degradation. I intended, as soon as I regained my self control, to say some really nasty things to her. Before I had made up my mind which of several possible remarks she would dislike most, Titherington came into the room. The nurse does not like Titherington. She has never liked him since the day that he kept her outside the door while we drank champagne. She always smoothes her apron with both hands when she sees him, which is a sign that she would like to do him a bodily injury if she could. On this occasion, alter smoothing her apron and shoving a protruding hair pin into the back of her hair, she marched out of the room.
“McMeekin tells me,” I said to Titherington, “that Vittie has got the influenza. Is it true?”
“He says he has,” said Titherington, with strong emphasis on the word “says.”
“Then I wish you’d go round and offer him the use of my nurse. I don’t want her.”
“He has two aunts, and besides——”
I was not going to allow Vittie’s aunts to stand in my way. I interrupted Titherington with an argument which I felt sure he would appreciate.
“He may have twenty aunts,” I said; “that’s not my point. What I’m thinking of is the excellent effect it will produce in the constituency if I publicly sacrifice myself by handing over my nurse to my political opponent. The amount of electioneering capital which could be made out of an act of heroism of that kind—why, it would catch the popular imagination more than if I jumped into a mill race to save Vittie from a runaway horse, and everybody knows that if you can bring off a spoof of that sort an election is as good as won.”
Titherington growled.