“No,” persisted Madame Dupont, “I tell you—she has got a cold in her head, and she has an eruption at the back of the throat.”
“Well,” cried the nurse, angrily, “if she has, it’s because the doctor scratched her with that spoon he put into her mouth wrong end first! A cold in the head? Yes, that’s true; but if she has caught cold, I can’t say when, I don’t know anything about it—nothing, nothing at all. I have always kept her well covered; she’s always had as much as three covers on her. The truth is, it was when you came, the time before last; you were all the time insisting upon opening the windows in the house!”
“But once more I tell you,” cried Madame Dupont, “we are not putting any blame on you.”
“Yes,” cried the woman, more vehemently. “I know what that kind of talk means. It’s no use—when you’re a poor country woman.”
“What are you imagining now?” demanded the other.
“Oh, that’s all right. It’s no use when you’re a poor country woman.”
“I repeat to you once more,” cried Madame Dupont, with difficulty controlling her impatience, “we have nothing whatever to blame you for.”
But the nurse began to weep. “If I had known that anything like this was coming to me—”
“We have nothing to blame you for,” declared the other. “We only wish to warn you that you might possibly catch the disease of the child.”
The woman pouted. “A cold in the head!” she exclaimed. “Well, if I catch it, it won’t be the first time. I know how to blow my nose.”