“Oh, very well, then,” grinned the Senior Surgeon. “We can consider everything all comfortably settled, then, I suppose?”
“No, we can’t,” screamed the White Linen Nurse. A little awkwardly, with cramped limbs, she struggled partly upward from the grass and knelt there, defying the Senior Surgeon from her temporarily superior height. “No, we can’t,” she reiterated wildly. “I tell you I can’t, sir. I won’t! I _won’t_! I’ve been engaged once, and it’s enough. I tell you, sir, I’m all engaged _out_!”
“What’s become of the man you were engaged to?” quizzed the Senior Surgeon, sharply.
“Why, he’s married,” said the White Linen Nurse. “And they’ve got a kid!” she added tempestuously.
“Good! I’m glad of it,” smiled the Senior Surgeon, quite amazingly. “Now he surely won’t bother us any more.”
“But I was engaged so long,” protested the White Linen Nurse--“almost ever since I was born, I said. It’s too long. You don’t get over it.”
“He got over it,” remarked the Senior Surgeon, laconically.
“Y-e-s,” admitted the White Linen Nurse; “but, I tell you, it doesn’t seem decent, not after being engaged--twenty years.” With a little helpless gesture of appeal she threw out her hands. “Oh, can’t I make you understand, sir?”
“Why, of course I understand,” said the Senior Surgeon, briskly. “You mean that you and John--”
“His name was Joe,” corrected the White Linen Nurse.
With astonishing amiability the Senior Surgeon acknowledged the correction.
“You mean,” he said--“you mean that you and--Joe have been cradled together so familiarly all your babyhood that on your wedding-night you could most naturally have said: ‘Let me see, Joe, it’s two pillows that you always have, isn’t it? And a double-fold of blanket at the foot?’ You mean that you and Joe have been washed and scrubbed together so familiarly all your young childhood that you could identify Joe’s headless body twenty years hence by the kerosene-lamp scar across his back? You mean that you and Joe have played house together so familiarly all your young tin-dish days that even your rag dolls called Joe father? You mean that since your earliest memory, until a year or so ago, life has never once been just you and life, but always you and life and Joe? You and spring and Joe, you and summer and Joe, you and autumn and Joe, you and winter and Joe, till every conscious nerve in your body has been so everlastingly Joed with Joe’s Joeness that you don’t believe there’s any experience left in life powerful enough to eradicate that original impression? Eh?”