Overcome by a bashfulness that tried to escape in jocosity, the Senior Surgeon gave an odd, choking little chuckle.
“Well, I never thought I should marry a—trained nurse!” he acknowledged with somewhat hectic blitheness.
Impulsively the White Linen Nurse reached for her watch and lifted it close to her twilight-blinded eyes. A sense of ineffable peace crept suddenly over her.
“You won’t, sir,” she said amiably. “It’s twenty minutes of nine now, and the graduation was at eight.”
FOR any real adventure except dying, June is certainly a most auspicious month.
Indeed, it was on the very first rain-green, rose-red morning of June that the White Linen Nurse sallied forth upon her extremely hazardous adventure of marrying the Senior Surgeon and his naughty little crippled daughter.
The wedding was at noon in some kind of gray-granite church. The Senior Surgeon was there, of course, and the necessary witnesses; but the Little Crippled Girl never turned up at all, owing, it proved later, to a more than usually violent wrangle with whomever dressed her, concerning the general advisability of sporting turquoise-colored stockings with her brightest little purple dress.
The Senior Surgeon’s stockings, if you really care to know, were gray, and the Senior Surgeon’s suit was gray, and he looked altogether very huge and distinguished, and no more strikingly unhappy than any bridegroom looks in a gray-granite church.
And the White Linen Nurse, no longer now truly a White Linen Nurse, but just an ordinary, every-day silk-and-cloth lady of any color she chose, wore something rather coaty and grand and bluish, and was distractingly pretty, of course, but most essentially unfamiliar, and just a tiny bit awkward and bony-wristed-looking, as even an admiral is apt to be on his first day out of uniform.
Then as soon as the wedding ceremony was over, the bride and groom went to a wonderful green-and-gold café, all built of marble and lined with music, and had a little lunch. What I really mean, of course, is that they had a very large lunch, but didn’t eat any of it.