“No! No! I’m all right. Only—”
“Get your legs back in bed.” The kindly Helen thrust back the protruding limbs, thereby wringing from the sufferer a muffled shriek which brought Maud Raines to the scene.
“It’s rheumatism, I think,” explained Helen to the newcomer. “Or else paralysis.”
“It isn’t,” denied Darcy indignantly.
“What is it, then?”
Racked by all manner of darting pains and convulsive cramps, Darcy began the cautious process of emerging from bed. “Do be good—ugh!” she implored. “And don’t—ooch!—ask questions—and draw me a boiling hot bath—ow-w-w!—and help me into it—oh-h-h-h—dear!”
Greatly wondering they followed the sufferer’s directions, got her duly en-tubbed, and ensconced themselves outside the door, which they left carefully ajar for explanations. All they got for this maneuver was an avowal of the bather’s firm intention of spending the rest of the day in the mollifying water.
“If you want to be really nice,” she added, “you might bring my coffee and rolls to me here.”
“Well, really!” said Maud indignantly, for this was a reversal of the normal order of things in Bachelor-Girls’ Hall. As the homely member of an otherwise attractive trio, Darcy had been, by common consent, constituted the meek and unprotesting servitor of the other two. Thus do relics of Orientalism persist among the most independent race of women known to history.
Darcy accepted the rebuff. “It doesn’t matter,” said she, with a quaver of self-pity. “I can’t have coffee. I can’t have hot rolls. I can’t have anything.”