The doctor laughed amusedly, and took a seat beside her. "What an eager little lady! Certainly that is the way to learn. But why this hurry? The great object first is to become robust. Oh, this air will do it! I have no fear. And how did you sleep?"
Paula blushed as if caught in fault. "I don't know why it should be I lay awake so much. My old doctor at home (I bless him for his inspiration of sending me here!) has written you about me, I suppose. I dare say you know I cough sometimes in the night. Doctor," she asked, abruptly, "who lives above us?"
He looked interrogatively at the ceiling, and shook his head.
"Oh, I am so sorry you do not happen to know. It is a great musician, and I feel much gratitude towards him. I was becoming nervous with lying awake—I was on the point of calling my poor cousin—when some one began playing on the piano in the room above me. Sweetly, very sweetly. I could hear it just distinctly enough. It was a joy. I lay awake, but it soothed me more than sleep."
"I seem to remember that there is a music-master living in the house," said the doctor. "I will beg the padrona to speak to him. He should not play in the night."
"Not at all," exclaimed Paula, with a warmth he could not expect. "Please, I want him to play. I shall be grieved if you say anything to prevent him. It does not keep me awake. If I were sleepy I could not hear it."
The doctor prolonged his visit far into the forenoon. At the first movement he made to go, Paula said, pleadingly: "Oh, not yet. I entertain myself so willingly with you!" And he stayed.
He was interested, in the woman as well as in the case. She was different from his other aristocratic patients. She was of a type new to him; without appearing to, he studied her face as she spoke, and from it, and from frequent allusions she dropped, he built up a theory of her past.
He divined that she was older than she looked. It was, he resolved, the childlike glance and smile, the voice as of shyness overcome, her artlessness, her continually outcropping ignorance of the world, her immature mind perhaps, that gave the impression of youthfulness one at first received from her. If one looked well, she had even already a sad little beginning of faded appearance. Her face was a trifle broad, and the high cheek-bones were commencing slightly to accuse themselves, as they say in French. The charm of her countenance, to such as felt it, lay in her eyes: they were unsophisticated, hopeful, interested, idealizing eyes. Vanity, it must be pityingly related, had taught her nothing. Her blond hair, dull and fine and soft—a large treasure that would have made the boast of many another woman—was drawn away rigorously from her forehead, braided, and wound compactly against the back of her head, like a school-girl's.