“Now, run along.” She almost put him out.
He thought her strangely cavalier and distant. He enjoyed her. For the first time, in long, he did not find Cornelia cloying. There had been none of the warm discomfort.
He was glad to come again. He was glad, now, in his supine state, when he was lifted in any way from his comfortless closeness with Tom.
It was a little party. Cornelia entertained quite often. She had always said, in the old days: “David, I do not invite you. What should you do with all these stupid people?—stupid and self-important. When I see you, David dear, I want you.”
Now, how different was Cornelia, how light and easy to get on with! David began to question, should he really want to see her alone, could he succeed? He came to just such a party of self-important people, nondescripts of whom he had met none before, with their endless chatter about remote, allusive topics, and wished to see none ever again. It was almost like meeting an old friend to find Miss Daindrie there. He reckoned that she and Cornelia must be fast friends. She was strange. Each time he met her she seemed to him so different he could not be sure he had met her before. He talked with her a great deal that evening.
Cornelia said: “There is only one person here you could possibly be interested in. Don’t mind being selfish, dear. Devote yourself to her. I’ll manage the others.”
He did. He scarcely spoke with Cornelia.
A pause of several ordinary weeks: a visit to the Magnum Institute.
“Would you like to see the great laboratories and the hospital?” Cornelia wrote him. “Doctor Westerling said I might come, and bring a friend.”
David escorted her. They went through a long, high room, cold and metallic and full of corrodent odors. It was painful to David. He felt that he was being cut by a very sharp steel blade, so that there was no pain, and yet it was painful Miss Daindrie was there in a white apron and a white stiff blouse. It seemed to David that the hard starched linen must cut into her softness. His teeth were a bit on edge, and he was afraid to look too close at the acids and the test-tubes full of evil germs and the smears of blood. The Doctor explained a culture of gelatine in which grew billions of organisms and over which Miss Daindrie pored as over a cradle. This brought nausea to David. He knew he was silly. “I would not want to be a doctor,” he whispered to Cornelia. He saw that she too was in pain in this chill temple of science.