“Oh! it is poor Marjorie I am so terribly anxious about,” said Leslie. “How is she bearing up? They are so devoted to each other.”
“Well, really, Leslie, to be plain with you, Marjorie is in a very extraordinary state. She simply won’t be reasonable. None of us can make her out, and the doctors are terribly annoyed with her. She cannot be got to leave Eileen’s room; we cannot drag her away. Poor Aunt Helen is in a perfectly terrible state about her. Her face is completely changed; she won’t eat anything,
and only drops off to sleep when she is too tired to stay awake for a moment. Leslie, if anything happens to Eileen, Marjorie will die.”
“But surely, Lettie, Eileen cannot be so bad as all that?”
“She is very bad indeed, I can tell you; I don’t think she can be much worse. There were two doctors here this morning, and there are two nurses, a day and a night nurse, on duty; and now Dr. Ericson wants to call in a third. Eileen took that horrible fever in the buildings where the coachman lives, not a doubt of it.”
“But I didn’t know that typhoid fever was really infectious,” said Leslie.
“In the ordinary sense it is not; but a whole family were down with it in A Block, and Eileen would go to the house, and she was very hot and thirsty, and they gave her some water to drink, and now it seems that all that water was terribly contaminated. It had some of those queer little things they call bacilli in it, and Dr. Ericson said they were the bacilli of typhoid fever. How puzzling these modern scientific names are!”
Lettie sank into an easy chair, and invited Leslie to one by her side.
“The fever is not infectious to us, you know,” she continued, “and that in a kind of way is a comfort. Eileen began to be poorly and not herself a week ago. Now she is very ill and quite unconscious, and yet the very worst stage of the fever is yet to come. You cannot imagine the state poor Aunt Helen is in.”
“I earnestly wish I could help,” said Leslie.