Eighty miles from where I
was born. I was thinking of laying up awhile, anyways. I got the means.
I'll pull him through, Doctor. I'll pull him through!
THE BARON: Good God! Teenie--you crazy--
FROM THE BED: Worth her weight in gold. Worth her weight in gold.
* * * * *
In the cup of a spring dusk that was filled to overflowing with an
ineffable sweetness and the rich, loamy odors of turned earth; with
rising sap and low mists; with blackening tree-tops and the chittering
of birds--the first lamplight of all the broad and fertile landscape
moved across the window of a story-and-a-half white house which might
have been either itself or its own outlying barn. A roof, sheer of
slant, dipped down over the window, giving the facade the expression of
a coolie under peaked hat.
"Great Scott! Move that lamp off the sill! You want to gimme the blind
staggers?"
"I didn't know it was in your eyes, honey. There--that better?"
Silence.
A parlor hastily improvised into a bedroom came out softly in the glow.
A room of matting and marble-topped, bottle-littered walnut table, of
white iron hospital-cot and curly horsehair divan, a dapple-marble
mantelpiece of conch-shell, medicated gauze, bisque figurines, and
hot-water kettle; in the sheerest of dimity, still dainty of ribbon, the
figure of Miss Hoag, hugely, omnipotently omnipresent.
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