"What a wicked little flirt you are!" he said, with a shake of the head.
"You'll come to a bad end, if you don't change your ways."
"Perform an operation, then, if you think you know what's the matter with me," she retorted. "Sometimes in operating for one disease we come on another, and then there's a lot of thinking to be done."
The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing. "If you were going to operate on me, what would it be for?" she asked more flippantly than her face showed.
"Well, it's obscure, and the symptoms are not usual, but I should strike for the cancer love," he answered, with a direct look.
She flushed and changed on the instant. "Is love a cancer?" she asked. All at once she felt sure that he read her real story, and something very like anger quickened in her.
"Unrequited love is," he answered deliberately. "How do you know it is unrequited?" she asked sharply.
"Well, I don't know it," he answered, dismayed by the look in her face.
"But I certainly hope I'm right. I do, indeed."
"And if you were right, what would you do—as a surgeon?" she questioned, with an undertone of meaning.
"I would remove the cause of the disease."
She came close and looked him straight in the eyes. "You mean that he should go? You think that would cure the disease? Well, you are not going to interfere. You are not going to manoeuvre anything to get him away—I know doctors' tricks. You'd say he must go away east or west to the sea for change of air to get well. That's nonsense, and it isn't necessary. You are absolutely wrong in your diagnosis—if that's what you call it. He is going to stay here. You aren't going to drive away one of our boarders and take the bread out of our mouths. Anyhow, you're wrong. You think because a girl worships a man's ability that she's in love with him. I adore your ability, but I'd as soon fall in love with a lobster—and be boiled with the lobster in a black pot. Such conceit men have!"