“What you mean is,” corrected the White Linen Nurse, “that needing _somebody_ very badly, you’ve just suddenly decided that that somebody might as well be me?”
“Well, if you choose to put it like that,” said the Senior Surgeon, a bit sulkily.
“And if there hadn’t been an auto accident,” argued the White Linen Nurse just out of sheer inquisitiveness, “if there hadn’t been just this particular kind of an auto accident at this particular hour of this particular day of this particular month, with marigolds and--everything, you probably never would have realized that you _did_ need anybody?”
“Maybe not,” admitted the Senior Surgeon.
“U-m-m,” said the White Linen Nurse. “And if you’d happened to take one of the other girls to-day instead of me, why, then I suppose you’d have felt that _she_ was the one you really needed? And if you’d taken the Superintendent of Nurses instead of any of us girls, you might even have felt that _she_ was the one you most needed?”
With surprising agility for a man with a sprained back he wrenched himself around until he faced her quite squarely.
“Now see here, Miss Malgregor,” he growled, “for Heaven’s sake, listen to sense, even if you can’t talk it! Here am I, a plain professional man, making you a plain professional offer. Why in thunder should you try and fuss me all up because my offer isn’t couched in all the foolish, romantic, lace-paper sort of flub-dubbery that you think such an offer ought to be couched in, eh?”
“Fuss you all up, sir?” protested the White Linen Nurse, with real anxiety.
[Illustration: Plates in tint, engraved for ~The Century~ by H. C. Merrill and H. Davidson
“‘THE CAR’S ON FIRE!’ HE MUMBLED. ‘YES, SIR,’ SAID THE WHITE LINEN NURSE. ‘WHY, DIDN’T YOU KNOW IT, SIR?’”
“Yes, fuss me all up,” snarled the Senior Surgeon, with increasing venom. “I’m no story-writer; I’m not trying to make up what might have happened a year from next February in a Chinese junk off the coast of--Nova Zembla to a Methodist preacher and a--and a militant suffragette. What I’m trying to size up is just what’s happened to you and me to-day. For the fact remains that it is to-day. And it is you and I. And there _has_ been an accident, and out of that accident--and everything that’s gone with it--I _have_ come out thinking of something that I never thought of before. And there _were_ marigolds,” he added with unexpected whimsicality. “You see, I don’t deny even the marigolds.”