But her image had not wilted, when he had found the intern who was to help him and had taken the spinal fluid. She was before him, provocative, enduring. He had to see her again, and convince her—“Take a better man than she is, better man than I’ve ever met, to get away with being insulting to me!” said the modest young scientist.
He had raced back to her room and they were staring at each other before it came to him that he had not worked out the crushing things he was going to say. She had risen from her scrubbing. She had taken off her turban, and her hair was silky and honey-colored, her eyes were blue, her face childish. There was nothing of the slavey in her. He could imagine her running down hillsides, shinning up a sack of straw.
“Oh,” she said gravely. “I didn’t mean to be rude then. I was just—Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought you were awfully nice, and I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did seem so young for a doctor.”
“I’m not. I’m a medic. I was showing off.”
“So was I!”
He felt an instant and complete comradeship with her, a relation free from the fencing and posing of his struggle with Madeline. He knew that this girl was of his own people. If she was vulgar, jocular, unreticent, she was also gallant, she was full of laughter at humbugs, she was capable of a loyalty too casual and natural to seem heroic. His voice was lively, though his words were only:
“Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess.”
“Not so awful, but it’s just as romantic as being a hired girl—that’s what we call ’em in Dakota.”
“Come from Dakota?”
“I come from the most enterprising town—three hundred and sixty-two inhabitants—in the entire state of North Dakota—Wheatsylvania. Are you in the U. medic school?”
To a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed absorbed in hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she by her scrubbing pail. She had reassumed her turban; its bagginess obscured her bright hair.
“Yes, I’m a Junior medic in Mohalis. But—I don’t know. I’m not much of a medic. I like the lab side. I think I’ll be a bacteriologist, and raise Cain with some of the fool theories of immunology. And I don’t think much of the bedside manner.”
“I glad you don’t. You get it here. You ought to hear some of the docs that are the sweetest old pussies with their patients—the way they bawl out the nurses. But labs—they seem sort of real. I don’t suppose you can bluff a bacteria—what is it?—bacterium?”
“No, they’re—What do they call you?”
“Me? Oh, it’s an idiotic name—Leora Tozer.”
“What’s the matter with Leora? It’s fine.”
Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and make them anything but hackneyed? And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient sounds was the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour when each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely missed, discovered now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bouncing rustics, like prince and princess. Their words were silly and inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together they were as wise and important as the tides or the sounding wind.
He told her that he admired Max Gottlieb, that he had crossed her North Dakota on a train, and that he was an excellent hockey-player. She told him that she “adored” vaudeville, that her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, was born in the East (by which she meant Illinois), and that she didn’t particularly care for nursing. She had no especial personal ambition; she had come here because she liked adventure. She hinted, with debonair regret, that she was not too popular with the superintendent of nurses; she meant to be good but somehow she was always dragged into rebellions connected with midnight fudge or elopements. There was nothing heroic in her story but from her placid way of telling it he had an impression of gay courage.
He interrupted with an urgent, “When can you get away from the hospital for dinner? Tonight?”
“Why—”
“Please!”
“All right.”
“When can I call for you?”
“Do you think I ought to—Well, seven.”
All the way back to Mohalis he alternately raged and rejoiced. He informed himself that he was a moron to make this long trip into Zenith twice in one day; he remembered that he was engaged to a girl called Madeline Fox; he worried the matter of unfaithfulness; he asserted that Leora Tozer was merely an imitation nurse who was as illiterate as a kitchen wench and as impertinent as a newsboy; he decided, several times he decided, to telephone her and free himself from the engagement.
He was at the hospital at a quarter to seven.
He had to wait for twenty minutes in a reception-room like that of an undertaker. He was in a panic. What was he doing here? She’d probably be agonizingly dull, through a whole long dinner. Would he even recognize her, in mufti? Then he leaped up. She was at the door. Her sulky blue uniform was gone; she was childishly slim and light in a princess frock that was a straight line from high collar and soft young breast to her feet. It seemed natural to tuck her hand under his arm as they left the hospital. She moved beside him with a little dancing step, shyer now than she had been in the dignity of her job but looking up at him with confidence.
“Glad I came?” he demanded.
She thought it over. She had a trick of gravely thinking over obvious questions; and gravely (but with the gravity of a child, not the ponderous gravity of a politician or an office-manager) she admitted, “Yes, I am glad. I was afraid you’d go and get sore at me because I was so fresh, and I wanted to apologize and—I liked your being so crazy about your bacteriology. I think I’m a little crazy, too. The interns here—they come bothering around a lot, but they’re so sort of—so sort of soggy, with their new stethoscopes and their brand-new dignity. Oh—” Most gravely of all: “Oh, gee, yes, I’m glad you came. . . . Am I an idiot to admit it?”
“You’re a darling to admit it.” He was a little dizzy with her. He pressed her hand with his arm.
“You won’t think I let every medic and doctor pick me up, will you?”
“Leora! And you don’t think I try and pick up every pretty girl I meet? I liked—I felt somehow we two could be chums. Can’t we? Can’t we?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see. Where are we going for dinner?”
“The Grand Hotel.”
“We are not! It’s terribly expensive. Unless you’re awfully rich. You aren’t, are you?”
“No, I’m not. Just enough money to get through medic school. But I want—”
“Let’s go to the Bijou. It’s a nice place, and it isn’t expensive.”
He remembered how often Madeline Fox had hinted that it would be a tasty thing to go to the Grand, Zenith’s most resplendent hotel, but that was the last time he thought of Madeline that evening. He was absorbed in Leora. He found in her a casualness, a lack of prejudice, a directness, surprising in the daughter of Andrew Jackson Tozer. She was feminine but undemanding; she was never Improving and rarely shocked; she was neither flirtatious nor cold. She was indeed the first girl to whom he had ever talked without self-consciousness. It is doubtful if Leora herself had a chance to say anything, for he poured out his every confidence as a disciple of Gottlieb. To Madeline, Gottlieb was a wicked old man who made fun of the sanctities of Marriage and Easter lilies,