Now and again across the chasm that separated them flashed the incontrovertible signal of mutual trust and appreciation, as when once, after a particularly violent vocal outburst on the Senior Surgeon’s part, he sobered down very suddenly and said:
“Rae Malgregor, do you realize that in all the weeks we’ve been together you’ve never once nagged me about my swearing? Not a word, not a single word!”
“I’m not very used to—words,” smiled the White Linen Nurse, a bit faintly. “All I know how to nag with is—is raw eggs. If we could only get those nerves of yours padded just once, sir!”
In August the Senior Surgeon suggested sincerely that the house was much too big for the White Linen Nurse to run all alone, but conceded equally sincerely, under the White Linen Nurse’s vehement protest, that servants, particularly new servants, did creak considerably round a house, and that maybe “just for the present” at least, until he finished the very nervous paper he was working on—perhaps it would be better to stay “just by ourselves.”
In September the White Linen Nurse wanted very much to go home to Nova Scotia to her sister’s wedding, but the Senior Surgeon was trying a very complicated and worrisome new brace on the Little Girl’s leg, and it didn’t seem quite kind to go. In October she planned her trip all over again. She was going to take the Little Crippled Girl with her this time. But with their trunks already packed and waiting in the hall, the Senior Surgeon came home from the hospital with a septic finger, and it didn’t seem quite best to leave him.
“Well, how do you like being married now?” asked the Senior Surgeon, a bit ironically in his workroom that night, after the White Linen Nurse had stood for an hour with evil-smelling washes and interminable bandages, trying to fix that finger the precise, particular way that he thought it ought to be fixed. “Well, how do you like being married now?” he insisted trenchantly.
“Oh, I like it all right, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. A little bit wanly this time she smiled her pluck up into the Senior Surgeon’s questioning face. “Oh, I like it all right, sir. Oh, of course, sir,” she confided thoughtfully—“oh, of course, sir, it isn’t quite as fancy as being engaged, or quite as free and easy as being single; but, still,” she admitted with desperate honesty—“but, still, there’s a sort of—a sort of a combination importance and—and comfort about it, sir, like a—like a velvet suit—the second year, sir.”
“Is that all?” quizzed the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.
“That’s all so far, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.
In November the White Linen Nurse caught a bit of cold that pulled her down a little. But the Senior Surgeon didn’t notice it specially among all the virulent ills he lived and worked with from day to day. And then when the cold disappeared, Indian summer came like a reeking sweat after a chill. And the house was big, and the Little Crippled Girl was pretty difficult to manage now and then, and the Senior Surgeon, no matter how hard he tried not to, did succeed somehow in creating more or less of a disturbance at least every other day or two.