CHAPTER XXXII
An hour later Thurley discovered herself in bed, a doctor watching her and Miss Clergy in the doorway, her face gray with apprehension. A nurse whispered she had fainted while standing at the window; that there was no need for alarm. The doctor added that she had brain fag, nothing serious if she would go away to some place where she could be pulled together. After more suave remarks and those little sugar-coated pellets left behind, he departed and Thurley sent the nurse and Miss Clergy away, tossing restlessly and wondering if she could make them understand that she would not go to a milk-fed sanitarium where nurses sneaked about in rubber-heeled shoes and one had to exclaim over sunsets with the other patients, to say nothing of bulletlike little biscuits and health foods and the talk on “Iceland Moss” given by a convalescent missionary!
When a wild rose tries to become a hothouse variety there is certain, some time during the transition, to be a bad scratching of thorns which was all that ailed Thurley.
In the morning Bliss Hobart dropped in to see her and Thurley brightened so visibly that the nurse left the room, grinning superciliously.
“Bother opera things,” Bliss said. “I’m really glad you fainted yesterday; you fainted enough for me, too, didn’t you? I was just considering getting up on top of Grant’s Tomb and dancing a Highland fling—masculine form of nerve fag.... I say, Thurley, do you know you’re coming with me to my hermitage? I’m leaving to-night and we’re to bully Miss Clergy into being chaperone.” Here they both laughed at each other like children and the pellets almost lost the sugar coating in wrath at the small part they played in curing this wild rose person! “Oh, yes, you are coming. I was just leaving for Blessed Memory myself when they told me you were ill. A month there will set you right.”
“You mean the place you disappear to—”
“And Lissa hints of a harem, a dope den, a gambling lair and what not? Yes, ma’am, Blessed Memory is its name. You’ll be there this time to-morrow. Remember, rouge boxes and high heels not admitted.”
He left her to thank her kind fortune she had had sense enough to faint and bruise herself slightly. Why, oh, why, had she never thought of doing so beforehand? She was humming as she waited for her maid to come and get a steamer trunk.... Miss Clergy watched from the corner of the doorway unawares. But what she thought she kept to herself.
Blessed Memory, buried in the wildest part of Maine, with the nearest post office entirely unpronounceable, proved to be an advance sample of paradise. Being perfect there was nothing complex about it—and very little to tell concerning it. Time flew, the hours tumbling over themselves like babies at play. It was exactly like the thirsty traveller coming upon the ice-cold mountain spring and drinking his fill with no comment but the satisfied and grateful, “A-a-h, man alive!” So it was with Thurley.