She took her head in her hands, and tried to concentrate all her faculties. She wasn't a shirker, and she realized that she must decide upon her course of conduct now and stick to it. If she didn't look out for herself, who would? And presently she had reached the conclusion that when Mr. Peter Champneys reappeared upon the scene, he must find Mrs. Peter Champneys occupying the foreground, and occupying it creditably, too. She'd do it! When Mr. Chadwick Champneys recovered, she'd come to terms with him. She'd keep faith.
She spent three or four anxious days, while specialists came and went, and white-capped, starched, authoritative personages relieved each other in the sick-room, their answers to all queries being that the patient was doing quite as well as could be expected. At the end of the fifth day they admitted that the patient was recovering,--was, in fact, out of danger, though he wouldn't leave his room for another week or ten days; and he wasn't to be worried or disturbed about anything.
Satisfied, then, that he was on the highroad to recovery, and having made up her mind as to her own course of procedure, Nancy rather enjoyed these few days of comparative freedom. She supplied herself with a huge box of bonbons, "Junie's Love Test" and "The Widowed Bride,"--books begun long ago, but wrested from her untimely by the ruthless Mrs. Baxter, on the score of takin' her time off: her rightful work for them that'd took her in, and fillin' her red head with the foolishest sort o' notions. She had had so much to do that to have nothing to do but lie around in a red silk kimona and nibble chocolates and read love stories, seemed to her the supreme height of felicity.
She reveled in these novels. They represented that something different toward which her untutored and stinted heart groped blindly. Otherwise her mind, by no means a poor one, lay fallow and untilled. The beauty and wonder of the world, the pity and terror of fate, the divine agony of love which sacrifices and endures, did not as yet exist for her. She merely sensed that there was something different, somewhere--maybe on the road ahead. And so she wept over the woes of star-crost lovers, and sentimentalized over husky heroes utterly unlike any male beings known to nature, and believed she didn't believe that disinterested and unselfish love existed in the world. As she hadn't the faintest gleam of self-knowledge, in all this she was perfectly sincere.