I was so entranced by Mrs. Bushytail’s vigour and excellence that I forgot about Mrs. Merchant, who had in the meantime been quietly rambling through the wards, timidly passing the time for the patients one by one. She is not a vital person, and she is very shy, but they watched her with the idle, restful pleasure which, when one is ill, a cat performing its simple toilet may afford without raising one’s temperature. I was left to my own resources, and felt most grateful when a thin, wiry little woman addressed me from the end bed.
“Nice change in the weather, isn’t it, Miss?” she said.
We exchanged a few comments on the uncertain habits of the sun, and then she said, with considerable feeling, “My! I’ll be glad to be about again. I’ll be out next week if all’s well, and I’m just going to enjoy meself a bit.”
“How?” I asked.
“I’ll be out a bit of an evening and get to one of the ’alls, perhaps. Do you care for them places, Miss?”
“I love them,” I assured her, feeling as if a great weight of care had been lifted from my chest. “Bert Hoskyn is coming this week, I know, and I wish I were going to see him.”
“Is he, indeed, Miss?” she said politely. “I don’t know his name exactly, but there’s many of them that’s grand. I’ll take a good look round next week, and maybe see the one you mention. You do get a bit down-’earted lyin’ ’ere with nothing to think of all day, without it’s the nurses or the food or your own inside. I’d show you the place, and welcome, where they stitched me up, Miss, but maybe nurse wouldn’t like it.”
“No,” I said, “I am sure she wouldn’t like you to disturb it; but you must show me some other time, if I meet you again.”
“That I will, Miss,” she promised heartily. “Any time you’re passing. Do you come far from ’ere?”
Mrs. Merchant took me home before our conversation got more interesting, but I came away refreshed and with a feeling that pleasure is not dead as I had suspected during the last few weeks. After all, pleasure to be any good must be something that sprouts in one’s own senses, and may be called to life by anything. The Millport idea of it is something of which you buy from a purveyor as much as you can afford, and then you pour it over yourself and other people. It rather deadens the spontaneous kind.