Fanny Fitch swung herself up to the footboard of her bed, and sat there, swinging her pretty feet. She smiled at her friend disarmingly; but Nan did not disarm under the smile.
“You’re the most distrustful creature I ever knew, Nancy Lockhart. Don’t you think I could get away with the nursing proposition? Smooth the fevered brow, and count the throbbing pulse, and charm the disordered brain back to sanity and calm? Read aloud to——”
“And wade around in floods of gore, and scrub the floor of the operating room, and keep on working when your back aches like fury, and get about four hours’ sleep out of twenty-four? Wear your white uniform with the ward below fifty degrees—and zero outside? Game, are you, Fanny?”
“Bless my soul!—how terribly technical you sound! What do you know about it all?”
“More than you do, I’ll wager. I’ve been reading about an American girl who has been in it for two years already. She ‘wears the rue—with a difference,’ methinks, Fanny.”
“Oh, well—I’ve got to get in it somehow,” announced the wearer of the pseudo-uniform frankly. “Because, you know, my friend Robert Black is going, and I can’t think with serenity of the wide Atlantic rolling between us. Of course there’s just one way I’d like to go, and maybe I’ll achieve that yet.” Her eyes sparkled. “Ye gods, but wouldn’t that be great! What’ll you wager I go—that way?”
“What way?”
“As his—well—” Fanny seemed to be enjoying herself intensely—“as his comrade-at-arms, you know—meaning, of course, his—comrade in arms. Oh-h!”—she gave the exclamation all the dramatic force it could hold, drawing it out with an effect of ecstasy—“Think of walking away with Robert McPherson Black from under the very eyes of his congregation—and of the demure but intriguing Jane!” And she threw both arms wide in a gesture of abandon, then clasped them across her breast, slipped down from the footboard, and fell at Nan’s feet, looking up at her with beseeching eyes and an utter change of aspect. “Oh, please, my dearest dear, don’t put any spokes in my wheel! Let me just imagine I’m doing something to bridge the chasm—the enormous chasm between us. It’s a frightful thing to be so deeply, darkly, desperately in love as I am—and then to see your hero absorbed in plans to take himself away from you, out of your world, with never a look behind!”
“Fanny!”
“Oh, but I’ll make him look behind—I will—I will! I’ll turn those rapt black eyes of his back to the earth, earthy—or to the United States, United States-y—and to Fanny Fitch. And—I’ll keep Jane Ray home if I have to put poison in her food.”