“Oh,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Oh.” Quite palpably a little shiver of flesh and starch went rustling through her. “I’ve had a wonderful day, too,” she confided softly. “I’ve cleaned the attic and darned nine pairs of your stockings and bought a sewing-machine and started to make you a white silk negligée shirt for a surprise.”
“Eh?” jerked out the Senior Surgeon.
The jerk seemed to liberate suddenly the faint vibration of dishes and the sound of ice knocking lusciously against a glass.
“Oh, have you had any supper, sir?” asked the White Linen Nurse.
With a prodigious sigh the Senior Surgeon threw his head back against the piazza railing and stretched his legs a little farther out along the piazza floor.
“Supper?” he groaned. “No; nor dinner, nor breakfast, nor any other blankety-blank meal as far back as I can remember.” Janglingly in his voice, fatigue, hunger, nerves, crashed together like the slammed notes of a piano. “But I wouldn’t move now,” he snarled, “if all the blankety-blank-blank foods in Christendom were piled blankety-blank-blank high on all the blankety-blank-blank tables in this whole blankety-blank-blank house.”
Ecstatically the White Linen Nurse clapped her hands.
“Oh, that’s just exactly what I hoped you’d say!” she cried. “’Cause the supper’s right here!”
“Here?” snapped the Senior Surgeon. Tempestuously he began all over again: “I tell you I wouldn’t lift my little finger if all the blankety-blank-blank-blank-blank—”
“Oh, goody, then!” said the White Linen Nurse. “’Cause now I can feed you! I sort of miss fussing with the canary-birds,” she added wistfully.