Then in a taxi-cab, just exactly like any other taxi-cab, the White Linen Nurse drove home alone to the Senior Surgeon’s great, gloomy house, to find her brand-new stepdaughter still screaming over the turquoise-colored stockings. And the Senior Surgeon, in a Canadian-bound train, just exactly like any other Canadian-bound train, started off alone, as usual, on his annual June “spree.”
Please don’t think for a moment that it was the Senior Surgeon who was responsible for the general eccentricities of this amazing wedding-day. No, indeed. The Senior Surgeon didn’t want to be married the first day of June. He said he didn’t, he growled he didn’t, he snarled he didn’t, he swore he didn’t; and when he finished saying and growling and snarling and swearing, and looked up at the White Linen Nurse for a confirmation of his opinion, the White Linen Nurse smiled perfectly amiably and said, “Yes, sir.” Then the Senior Surgeon gave a great gasp of relief and announced resonantly: “Well, it’s all settled, then? We’ll be married some time in July, after I get home from Canada?” And when the White Linen Nurse kept right on smiling perfectly amiably and said, “Oh, no, sir, oh, no, thank you, sir; it wouldn’t seem exactly legal to me to be married any other month but June,” the Senior Surgeon went absolutely dumb with rage that this mere chit of a girl, and a trained nurse, too, should dare to thwart his personal and professional convenience. But the White Linen Nurse just drooped her pretty blonde head and blushed and blushed and blushed and said: “I was only marrying you, sir, to—accommodate you, sir, and if June doesn’t accommodate you, I’d rather go to Japan with that monoideic somnambulism case. It’s very interesting, and it sails June 2.” Then, “Oh, hell with the ‘monoideic somnambulism case’!” the Senior Surgeon would protest.
Really it took the Senior Surgeon quite a long while to work out the three special arguments that would best protect him, he thought, from the horridly embarrassing idea of being married in June.
“But you can’t get ready so soon,” he suggested at last with real triumph. “You’ve no idea how long it takes a girl to get ready to be married. There are so many people she has to tell—and everything.”
“There’s never but two that she’s got to tell, or bust,” conceded the White Linen Nurse with perfect candor—“just the woman she loves the most and the woman she hates the worst. I’ll write my mother to-morrow, but I told the Superintendent of Nurses yesterday.”
“The deuce you did!” snapped the Senior Surgeon.
Almost caressingly the White Linen Nurse lifted her big blue eyes to his.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “And she looked as sick as a young undertaker. I can’t imagine what ailed her.”
“Eh?” choked the Senior Surgeon. “But the house, now,” he hastened to contend—“the house, now, needs a lot of fixing over; it’s all run down. It’s all—everything. We never in the world could get it into shape by the first of June. For Heaven’s sake, now that we’ve got money enough to make it right, let’s go slow and make it perfectly right.”
A little nervously the White Linen Nurse began to fumble through the pages of her memorandum-book.