“Frankly, Miss Malgregor,” he affirmed, “I’m much more addicted to carving people than to carving trees; and as to Sunday-school picnics—well, really now, I hardly believe that you’d find my demands in that direction excessive.”
Perplexedly the White Linen Nurse tried to stare her way through his bantering smile to his real meaning. Furiously, as she stared, the red blood came flushing back into her face.
“You don’t mean for a second that you—that you love me?” she asked incredulously.
“No, I don’t suppose I do,” acknowledged the Senior Surgeon with equal bluntness; “but my little kiddie here loves you,” he hastened somewhat nervously to affirm. “Oh, I’m almost sure that my little kiddie here—loves you. She needs you, anyway. Let it go at that. Call it that we both—need you.”
“What you mean is,” corrected the White Linen Nurse, “that needing somebody very badly, you’ve just suddenly decided that that somebody might as well be me?”
“Well, if you choose to put it like that,” said the Senior Surgeon, a bit sulkily.
“And if there hadn’t been an auto accident,” argued the White Linen Nurse just out of sheer inquisitiveness, “if there hadn’t been just this particular kind of an auto accident at this particular hour of this particular day of this particular month, with marigolds and—everything, you probably never would have realized that you did need anybody?”
“Maybe not,” admitted the Senior Surgeon.
“U-m-m,” said the White Linen Nurse. “And if you’d happened to take one of the other girls to-day instead of me, why, then I suppose you’d have felt that she was the one you really needed? And if you’d taken the Superintendent of Nurses instead of any of us girls, you might even have felt that she was the one you most needed?”
“Oh, hell!” said the Senior Surgeon.