If Sidney was puzzled, she kept it bravely to herself. In her little room at night, with the door carefully locked, she tried to think things out. There were a few treasures that she looked over regularly: a dried flower from the Christmas roses; a label that he had pasted playfully on the back of her hand one day after the rush of surgical dressings was over and which said “Rx, Take once and forever.”
There was another piece of paper over which Sidney spent much time. It was a page torn out of an order book, and it read: “Sigsbee may have light diet; Rosenfeld massage.” Underneath was written, very small:
“You are the most beautiful person in the world.”
Two reasons had prompted Wilson to request to have Sidney in the operating-room. He wanted her with him, and he wanted her to see him at work: the age-old instinct of the male to have his woman see him at his best.
He was in high spirits that first day of Sidney's operating-room experience. For the time at least, Carlotta was out of the way. Her somber eyes no longer watched him. Once he looked up from his work and glanced at Sidney where she stood at strained attention.
“Feeling faint?” he said.
She colored under the eyes that were turned on her.
“No, Dr. Wilson.”
“A great many of them faint on the first day. We sometimes have them lying all over the floor.”
He challenged Miss Gregg with his eyes, and she reproved him with a shake of her head, as she might a bad boy.