“We’d better make her a cup of beef tea as quickly as we can,” said Nance. “That will quench her thirst and nourish her at the same time. Good heavens, Molly, what shall we do if she begins to talk about the slipper and the lake?”
“I don’t know,” replied Molly, lighting the alcohol lamp, while Nance found the jar of beef extract. “I wish you hadn’t given her so much physic, Nance.” Molly had a deep-rooted objection to medicine, while Nance, on the other hand, was a firm believer in old-fashioned remedies. “Her stomach was in no condition for all that stuff. It was utterly upset. Her gastric juices had been lashed into a storm and hadn’t had time to subside.”
Nance smiled at Molly’s ignorance.
“You are getting the emotions and the stomach mixed, Molly, dear.”
Now, Molly had her own ideas on this subject, but it was vain to argue with her friend, the actual proprietor of a real medicine chest marked “Household Remedies,” which contained more than a dozen phials of physics.
Judy was, in fact, paying the penalty for her mental storm when on the night of the play she had run through the whole scale of emotions, beginning with stage fright and an awful fear and passing into mortification, disappointment, rage, remorse and finally sorrow, or it might be called self-pity, which inspired her to launch a canoe and paddle into the middle of the lake at midnight. It will never be known how near she came to jumping into the lake. It is difficult to reckon with an unrestrained, hypersensitive nature like hers, always up in the heights or down in the depths; sometimes capable of splendid acts of generosity and unselfishness, but capable also of inflicting cruel punishments for imagined offences.
Nance was for more medicine.
“Suppose I give her a big dose of castor oil, Molly,” she suggested, while she stirred the tea. “She had better take it before she drinks this.”
“Goodness, Nance, you’ll kill her,” exclaimed Molly, horrified. “Don’t you see that it is entirely a mental thing with Judy? What she needs is absolute quiet, and the quinine has probably excited her and made her delirious. She doesn’t need things to stimulate her. She’s almost effervescent in her normal condition, anyhow.”
“Castor oil isn’t a stimulant, child.”