She got up out of her husband’s chair. “I think you’re right,” she said, in a quick, hoarse tone. “I mean about me seeing a doctor, Bunting. I think I will go and see a doctor this very afternoon.”
“Wouldn’t you like me to go with you?” he asked.
“No, that I wouldn’t. In fact I wouldn’t go at all you was to go with me.”
“All right,” he said vexedly. “Please yourself, my dear; you know best.”
“I should think I did know best where my own health is concerned.”
Even Bunting was incensed by this lack of gratitude. “’Twas I said, long ago, you ought to go and see the doctor; ’twas you said you wouldn’t!” he exclaimed pugnaciously.
“Well, I’ve never said you was never right, have I? At any rate, I’m going.”
“Have you a pain anywhere?” He stared at her with a look of real solicitude on his fat, phlegmatic face.
Somehow Ellen didn’t look right, standing there opposite him. Her shoulders seemed to have shrunk; even her cheeks had fallen in a little. She had never looked so bad—not even when they had been half starving, and dreadfully, dreadfully worked.
“Yes,” she said briefly, “I’ve a pain in my head, at the back of my neck. It doesn’t often leave me; it gets worse when anything upsets me, like I was upset last night by Joe Chandler.”