"Why should I?" she asked, "with a doctor at hand? I was thinking all the time how you lean on a doctor. I should never have known what to do. How is she? What was the matter?"
"She's resting. It isn't every elderly lady who can get a compartment from the Pullman Company for the price of a seat. She was put on at Albany by one set of grandchildren and she's to be taken off at Boston by another set. And she's old and her heart's a little sluggish—self-sacrifice goes downward not upward, through the generations, I observe—though I'm a young physician at that!"
Her next words, simply spoken as they were, threw him again into confusion.
"I don't know your name, I think—mine is Annette Markham."
Dr. Blake drew out a card.
"Dr. W.H. Blake, sometime contract surgeon to the Philippine Army of Occupation," he supplemented, "now looking for a practice in these United States!"
"The Philippines—oh, you've been in the East? When we were in the Orient, I used to hear of them ever so dimly—I didn't think we'd all be talking of them so soon—"
"Oh, you've been in the Orient—do you know the China Coast—and Nikko and—"
"No, only India."
"I've never been there—and I've heard it's the kernel of the East," he said with his lips. But his mind was puzzling something out and finding a solution. The accent of that deep, resonant voice was neither Eastern nor Western, Yankee nor Southern—nor yet quite British. It was rather cosmopolitan—he had dimly placed her as a Californienne. Perhaps this fragment explained it. She must be a daughter of the English official class, reared in America. The theory would explain her complexion and her simple, natural balance between frankness and reserve. He formed that conclusion, but, "How do you like America after India?" was all he said.