“It looks like—hell!” he muttered feebly.
“Yes, isn’t it sweet?” conceded the White Linen Nurse, with unmistakable joyousness. “And your library—” Triumphantly she threw back the door to his grim workshop.
“Good God!” stammered the Senior Surgeon, “you’ve made it pink!”
Rapturously the White Linen Nurse began to clasp and unclasp her hands.
“I knew you’d love it,” she said.
Half dazed with bewilderment, the Senior Surgeon started to brush an imaginary haze from his eyes, but paused midway in the gesture, and pointed back instead to a dapper little hall-table that seemed to be exhausting its entire blond strength in holding up a slender green vase with a single pink rose in it. Like a caged animal buffeting for escape against each successive bar that incased it, the man’s frenzied irritation hurled itself hopefully against this one more chance for explosive exit.
“What—have—you—done—with the big—black—escritoire that stood—there?” he demanded accusingly.
“Escritoire? Escritoire?” worried the White Linen Nurse. “Why—why, I’m afraid I must have mislaid it.”
“Mislaid it?” thundered the Senior Surgeon. “Mislaid it? It weighed three hundred pounds!”
“Oh, it did?” questioned the White Linen Nurse, with great blue-eyed interest. Still mulling apparently over the fascinating weight of the escritoire, she climbed up suddenly into a chair, and with the fluffy, broom-shaped end of her extraordinarily long braid of hair went angling wildly off into space after an illusive cobweb.