“Why, it would be a horrible job,” confided the Senior Surgeon, with no demureness whatsoever.
Very soberly, very thoughtfully, then, across the tangled, snuggling head of his own and another woman’s child, he urged the torments and the comforts of his home upon this second woman.
“What is there about my offer that you don’t like?” he demanded earnestly. “Is it the whole idea that offends you? Or just the way I put it? ‘General heartwork for a family of two’—what is the matter with that? Seems a bit cold to you, does it, for a real marriage proposal? Or is it that it’s just a bit too ardent, perhaps, for a mere plain business proposition?”
“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.
“Yes, what?” insisted the Senior Surgeon.
“Yes—sir,” flushed the White Linen Nurse.
Very meditatively the Senior Surgeon reconsidered his phrasing. “‘General heartwork for a family of two’? U-m-m.” Quite abruptly even the tenseness of his manner faded from him, leaving his face astonishingly quiet, astonishingly gentle. “But how else, Miss Malgregor,” he queried—“how else should a widower with a child proffer marriage to a—to a young girl like yourself? Even under conditions directly antipodal to ours, such a proposition can never be a purely romantic one. Yet even under conditions as cold and businesslike as ours, there’s got to be some vestige of affection in it, some vestige at least of the intelligence of affection, else what gain is there for my little girl and me over the purely mercenary domestic service that has racked us up to this time with its garish faithlessness?”
“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.
“But even if I had loved you, Miss Malgregor,” explained the Senior Surgeon, gravely, “my offer of marriage to you would not, I fear, have been a very great oratorical success. Materialist as I am, cynic, scientist, any harsh thing you choose to call me, marriage in some freak, boyish corner of my mind still defines itself as being the mutual sharing of a—mutually original experience. Certainly, whether a first marriage be instigated in love or worldliness, whether it eventually proves itself bliss, tragedy, or mere sickening ennui, to two people coming mutually virgin to the consummation of that marriage, the thrill of establishing publicly a man-and-woman home together is an emotion that cannot be reduplicated while life lasts.”