He took from under his pillow a packet of little blue letters, tightly tied with a piece of twine.
“Here they are! These letters have meant a lot to me while I was in the trenches. They still mean a lot to me. They were written by my Fairy Godmother.”
“Oh! Are they love letters?”
“No, indeed! I wouldn’t ask a woman to read another woman’s love letters. I wouldn’t let anyone but you read these letters, but my eyes are too punk to read them myself and I have to—to hear them to decide something, something very important.”
“All right! A nurse is a kind of father confessor and what one hears professionally is sacred.”
“But, my dear, I am not thinking of you as a nurse.”
“But I am thinking of you as a patient.”
She slipped the top letter from the packet and turned it over. “So your name is Stephen Scott!”
“Didn’t you know my name, either? How funny!”
“I only know the names of the patients who have charts, and you are too well to waste a chart on. We nurses call you the convalescent American. Sure these are not love letters?”