He had been waiting for that. Once at least, whenever they were together, she brought Max into the conversation. She was quite unconscious of it.
“You and Max are great friends. I knew you would like him. He is interesting, don't you think?”
“Very,” said K.
To save his life, he could not put any warmth into his voice. He would be fair. It was not in human nature to expect more of him.
“Those long talks you have, shut in your room—what in the world do you talk about? Politics?”
“Occasionally.”
She was a little jealous of those evenings, when she sat alone, or when Harriet, sitting with her, made sketches under the lamp to the accompaniment of a steady hum of masculine voices from across the hall. Not that she was ignored, of course. Max came in always, before he went, and, leaning over the back of a chair, would inform her of the absolute blankness of life in the hospital without her.
“I go every day because I must,” he would assure her gayly; “but, I tell you, the snap is gone out of it. When there was a chance that every cap was YOUR cap, the mere progress along a corridor became thrilling.” He had a foreign trick of throwing out his hands, with a little shrug of the shoulders. “Cui bono?” he said—which, being translated, means: “What the devil's the use!”
And K. would stand in the doorway, quietly smoking, or go back to his room and lock away in his trunk the great German books on surgery with which he and Max had been working out a case.
So K. sat by the dining-room table and listened to her talk of Max that last evening together.