“Is he too young, or too old, to join forces?”
“No, he’s just right, and he’d be only too glad to join forces, or anything else that had me in it, but he mustn’t, and that’s the reason Laura made me come here!” And with this she punched the sofa-pillows rebelliously, looking more like an enraged Angora kitten than anything else.
“It’s your hour for cold spray,” said Jimmy, the page-boy, peeping in at the crack of the door.
“I’ll come!” she responded unwillingly. “Now do steal in again,” she whispered, turning to me, “for I must talk to somebody, and if Laura could see you I know she would think you safer than anybody here.”
That afternoon, as I swung in my hammock in the grove below the sanitarium, I looked up at its three stories of height and its rows upon rows of windows, and wondered how many cases of neurasthenia under its roof were traceable to a conflict between love and conscience. “I begin to have an interest in that chatterbox neighbor of mine,” I thought drowsily, “and that, after vowing not to make an acquaintance in this place. Love will be a side dish, not the roast, in her bill of fare, if I am any judge of character, and why does her Laura attempt to stem the natural tide of events? It is almost wicked of the Fates to give such a featherhead any problems to solve; she ought to have her what’s-his-name, Beckett, if she wants him, particularly if he wants her. As for the noble Laura, I long to make her acquaintance. I can almost hear the uncongenial stepmother, the feverish cook, and the infuriated directors, clamoring for a providence to remove her from their field of vision, and substitute some thoroughly practical and ignoble person in her stead.”
Sunday
I was very happy all the morning; so happy that I forgot my tonics, massage, and sedative tablets; but the doctor called at noon and spoke of the wonderful way in which my system responded to his remedies, so I said nothing.
Cousin Sarah forwarded me a letter from Richard Morton, who is superintending some surveying near a small town in Pennsylvania. He knows that I am not well and away from home on a visit to the country, but, of course, he is not aware of my exact whereabouts. It was just one of his gay, friendly letters, with an undertone of something warmer in it. Among other things he said:
How weak a thing is man! Now that you are so far away and I am exiled in a village where there is but one post a day I suffer pangs of hunger for a word from you. So far the one daily mail would have been all too ample for your desires, since you have not written a word as yet; but there is always the hope! I have been speculating to-night upon the frightful risks and dangers surrounding the man who is waiting for a letter. It seems to me the very best postal service is inadequate to take care of a letter from you to me! Think of the uncertainties and perils to which it is exposed in .pm +1 transit! You give it to a maid to drop in a pillar post-box, but she may forget and leave it in her pocket, or she may lose it. Or say she drops it in; it must be removed from the box by an ordinary human being who has no conception of the issues involved in the rigid performance of this particular duty. The letter is then taken to the branch office of your section, then to the general post, and then to the railway, where new dangers menace its precious existence. The train may be robbed; and if a single letter is stolen it will be yours to me. No man alive could resist a letter of yours after he had once read one.