“But, honest, I don’t even remember which of the eight she was.”
“Huh! Then you’ve been making love to all of ’em, that’s why. Drat her! Well, I’m not going to go on scrapping about it. I just wanted to warn you, that’s all.”
At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short, jovial, convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with Orchid, he stammered, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay down and walk a little more. I’ve got to figure this health department business out.”
He sat in the Sims House office—singularly dismal it was, after midnight, and singularly smelly.
“That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I’d told him right out that we know hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis, for instance.
“Just the same, she’s a darling child. Orchid! She’s like an orchid—no, she’s too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting with. Sweet. And she acted as if I were her own age, not an old doctor. I’ll be good, oh, I’ll be good, but— I’d like to kiss her once, good! She likes me. Those darling lips, like—like rosebuds!
“Poor Leora. I nev’ was so astonished in my life. Jealous. Well, she’s got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man like— Lee, sweet, can’t you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner with seventeen billion Orchids, it’d be you I loved, and never anybody but you!
“I can’t go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette stuff. Even if it did instruct people, which it don’t. Be almost better to let ’em die than have to live and listen to—
“Leora said I was a ‘backwoods hick.’ Let me tell you, young woman, as it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may recall the kind of books the ‘backwoods hick’ was reading to you last winter, and even Henry James and everybody and— Oh, she’s right. I am. I do know how to make pipets and agar, but— And yet some day I want to travel like Sondelius—
“Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead of Pickerbaugh, I’d slave for him—