She was not gone, indeed, much longer than that, but when she came back from her kitchenette he had dropped like a log upon her divan, submerged beyond all soundings. So she tugged him around into a more comfortable position, managed to divest him of his dinner-jacket and his waistcoat, unbuttoned his collar and shirt-band, took off his shoes, and covered him up with an eiderdown quilt. Then she kissed him—it was five years since she had done that—and went, herself, to bed.
At ten o'clock the next morning she sat behind her little breakfast table—it was daintily munitioned with a glass coffee machine, a grapefruit and a plate of toast—waiting, over The Times, for Rush to wake up. She looked more seraphic than ever, enveloped in a white turkish toweling bathrobe and with her hair in a braid. Her brother lay on the divan just as she had left him the night before. Presently the change in his breathing told her that he was struggling up out of the depths of sleep. She looked over at him and saw him blinking at the ceiling. When his gaze started round her way, she turned her attention to the busy little coffee machine which opportunely needed it.
It was a minute or two before he spoke. "Is that really you, Mary?"
She smiled affectionately at him and said, "Hello," adding with just an edge of good-humored mischief, "How do you feel?"
He turned abruptly away from her. "I feel loathsome," he said.
"Poor dear, of course you do. I'll tell you what to do. I've got a nice big bathroom in there. Go in and take a cold one." Then—"You've grown inches, Rush, since you went away but I believe you could still get into a suit of my pajamas—plain ones, not ruffly. Anyhow, I've another big bathrobe like this that you could roll up in. You'll be just in time for the coffee. You won't know yourself by then."
"I wish I didn't," he said morosely.
There wasn't much good arguing with that mood, she knew, so she waited a little.
"Is this where you live?" he asked. "You brought me here last night?"
"You brought me," she amended.