I went, soiled dress and crying eyes and hair all rumpled and mussed with the excitement.
"Phyllie," said Lovelace Peyton, who was sitting up in bed defying them all, "I ain't a-going to let that doctor touch me 'thout you stand right here and tell me how it all looks just as he does it. Don't leave out any bleed that comes, or any blue flesh or nerves or nothing. You know how, 'cause I have teached you. Neither Doug or Roxy ain't no good with symptoms."
"You stand right here and tell me how it all looks"
"I will, Lovelace Peyton, I will," I answered; but I shuddered, for how could I stand to see him tortured, as I felt he was going to be?
But I did—and it makes me weak to think about it now so that I shake all over. As the instruments pried and pulled and injected the aseptic solutions I held his hand tight and talked as hard as I could. At the worst places I told the most awful lies about how horrible it looked and placed all the frightful symptoms of every disease I had read to him, right in his eyes. It sounded dreadful but I knew that it interested him and helped in a way nothing else could.
"Go on, Phyllie, tell more," he would groan as I stopped for breath—and on I would go piling inflammation on suppuration.
Finally, after what seemed an age, the doctor drew a long sigh and looked up at me with a kindly expression that I knew meant "saved." For a minute I reeled, and I do believe I would have learned what fainting meant the same day I learned crying, if those little fingers hadn't held on to me tight while the doctor gave just a whiff of chloroform to ease the twitching nerves. He had been obliged to do the operation without it, but risked just the whiff.
"Don't the chloroform smell good, Phyllie?" Lovelace Peyton whispered up to me as he floated off and his hands relaxed.