"He told me that I had to take a rest. I told him I hadn't worked for weeks. Then he told me that whatever I was doing I should stop it."
"You are not telling me what he really said," Augusta commented.
"Oh, big words, all big long ones, that might have meant polygamy or liver trouble for all I knew. But the upshot of it was just what I knew before. I'm nervous and my temper is bad. And he must have known that I didn't have any money, for he really didn't ask me for any," he confessed gracelessly as an afterthought.
"But it's just as I told him. If I could only rap out a decent few lines I'd be all—"
A sharp fit of coughing came up, choking him. He rose and hurried out into the hall. Augusta started to follow him, but a movement in the bedroom caught her ear and she turned back. She wanted to follow him, to make him tell her just what was the trouble. But the fear of what her mother might do was too strong upon her.
For the time, Wardwell had escaped. In his own room, he sat down at the desk, gasping between spells of coughing and trying to smother the noise with his handkerchief. The coughing stopped after a little, and he was surprised to feel a sensation of pleasant warm moisture in his irritated throat.
He cocked one ear up in a funny way he had, as though to listen. Then put his handkerchief to his lips and held it there a moment. When he drawn it away and looked meditatively for a little while at the red blotch on it, he nodded his head.
He did not take this fresh piece of news argumentatively, defiantly, as he had met the words of the doctor. This was definite, conclusive. He must deliberate. He decided that he would deliberate. That was the thing. This matter must be thought out carefully.
He looked at the typewriter in front of him, for counsel. Then suddenly his arms shot out grabbing the rusted iron frame of the typewriter and hugging it, while his head sank down upon it and he whispered to it in agony:
"God! Never another good line on you!"