Virginia disregarded future calamities. “I have a letter from Joe Curtis. It happens to be one which I might read to you, if you are real nice.”
Instantly, feminine curiosity caused Helen to forget injuries and pledged vengeance. “Please, ‘V.,’ I should love to hear it,” she begged, and then listened with rapt attention as her cousin read,
“My dear little girl:
“This morning Miss Knight brought your letter to me on the grounds where I had been taken in the roller chair. She was grumbling about it being the business of the Post Office Department to establish a rural free delivery route and not expect her to chase around with my mail.
“I spend most of my time in the chair, now. Soon I’ll be on crutches, and after that it won’t be long before I am discharged.
“But this letter is written to give you the big news. The room for motorcyclists is open for business. Miss Knight took me to see it and it is dandy. I asked her what she thought about it now, seeing that she had so much to say when we were planning it. Her answer was, ‘It’s the best cure for blues I know. If I am downhearted, all I have to do is to come up here and think about you two innocents and I laugh myself sick.’
“I told her that her ideas of humor led towards the psychopathic ward and warned her to beware of alienists or squirrels because they might develop a personal interest in her.
“What do you think? The very day they opened the room it had a patient. You never would guess who it was. It was that fellow Jones who works in your father’s office. He must be a regular dare devil of a rider. When the accident happened, he had cut in front of a moving street car. The machine hung in the fender and Jones went on and landed in a city trash wagon at the curb. His head and face were cut but the trash was soft. He bled so that the by-standers decided that he was dying and sent him to the hospital. Of course, the doctors kept him.
“Miss Knight said that, from the odor about Jones when he came in, she guessed people were careless about separating trash from garbage. She told Jones that he must have thought he was among old home folks when he landed.
“To be neighborly, I called upon him. Everything was beautiful in the room but him. I told him that he looked as out of place as a dead rat in a flour barrel. That peeved him, so I asked him if he hadn’t felt more at home in the trash wagon. He got sore and grabbed up a glass. ‘I’ll bounce this off your ventilator if you don’t get out of here,’ he yelled.