"Miss Grant—if you'll bring that confounded tray in I'll try to eat a bite—"
Felicia's eyes surveyed the empty tray, her lips moved but she could not speak.
"Miss Grant—I said I'd—"
She stood before him, her eyes dropped demurely to hide her mirth. She had had the presence of mind to bring his orange juice, but when she looked up she felt suddenly very sorry. For he was not a beautiful old man like Grandy. He was wrinkled and yellow and gaunt and cross looking. He was not sad at being old, he was bitter.
Her heart went out to him, her mirth died as suddenly as a frightened child's.
"Are you really vairee hungry?" she asked solicitously.
Her low voice was not professionally low like the nurse's, it was just sweetly, normally low—to that irritable old man who lived in a family of shrill voices it sounded like an angel's. Her smoothly coiffed head and antiquated gown spoke eloquently to him of a past when women dressed as he thought women should dress.
He turned on his pillow and looked at her.
"Lord no! I'm not hungry! I'm never hungry—but what in the Jumping
Jehosophat are you doing here?"
"I'm mending. By-the-day, you know. Your nurse went walking. And your cook went to see her cousin. So if you really were hungry—isn't it lucky you aren't?—I don't know what we would do." She advanced to the bedside. He made her want to shudder, he was so ugly in his long green dressing gown. With his bald head and piercing eyebrows he made her think of a gigantic worm. When he spoke his head waggled just as a worm's head waggles when it tops a rose bush.