“How’s the Great Lover?” she asked another, who had come out of the ether revealing certain startling chapters of his amatory experiences. “The Hearst papers have got a reporter planted under your bed, so you had better be careful of what you say in your sleep. They’re running the first chapter of your memoirs, An Ethereal Affinity, tonight.”
“You know I have only one love,” mocked back the Great Lover, stretching out his arms.
“I wonder who that can be,” said Meadows and popped a thermometer into his mouth.
“Great Scott, nurse, I’m burning up!” cried a patient. Meadows snatched the thermometer from his hand to find the mercury near the top of the column. It was an old trick, however. The patient had held the end of a cigarette to the bulb.
“My, oh my!” Meadows shook her head, so that the brown curls straggled out from beneath her cap. “We’ll have to cut out the nicotine. No more cigarettes from now on, and you’ll see how soon your temperature goes back to normal!”
“Not one cigarette, nursey?” pleaded the practical joker.
“Not a chocolate cigarette—unless you share it with me!”
For each there was some bit of badinage that made the dreary days of convalescence pass all the more quickly. Even with the more serious cases, the officers whose jaws had been replaced with pieces of metal strung together by wire, the officers who had been blinded, the amputations—Meadows joked.
Hamilton was making comparisons. He wondered whether the girl to whom he had become engaged just before he left for France could have stood the gaff as well. Physically they were remarkably alike. They could easily pass for cousins, even sisters. They were both little women and both had a girlish animation. Both were dark, with wavy brown hair and large brown eyes. Eyes of a wild doe, Hamilton used to say of Margaret. Meadows might have been an inch taller and correspondingly heavier. But the same domed forehead, refined nose, bowed lips.
Hamilton wondered whether Margaret, so graceful on the dance floor, so competent in the drawing room, or at the dinner table, would be equally at home in a hospital ward. Could she have rubbed a man’s back with alcohol, or placed a drain in a gaping wound as successfully as she poured tea—do all these things with a smile? He wondered.