“Yes.”
“Well, then, you give me one and I’ll give you this one.”
“But I haven’t talked to anybody but the Doctor. I can give you one from myself. He asked me how I liked you and I said all right.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing. Here’s what Miss Halsey said: She said if you were shaved and fixed up, you wouldn’t be bad. And now I’m going out and see if there’s any mail for me. Most of my mail goes to where I live, but some of it comes here sometimes. What I’m looking for is a letter from the state board telling me if I passed my state examination. They ask you the craziest questions. Like ‘Is ice a disinfectant?’ Who cares! Nobody’s going to waste ice to kill germs when there’s so much of it needed in highballs. Do you like highballs? Roy says it spoils whisky to mix it with water. He takes it straight. He’s a terror! But maybe you want to read.”
“Good morning,” said Miss Lyons. “Did you sleep good?”
“Not so good,” said the man in bed. “I—”
“I bet you got more sleep than I did,” said Miss Lyons. “He’s the most persistent somebody I ever knew! I asked him last night, I said, ‘Don’t you never get tired of dancing?’ So he said, well, he did get tired of dancing with some people, but there was others who he never got tired of dancing with them. So I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Jollier, but I wasn’t born yesterday and I know apple sauce when I hear it and I bet you’ve told that to fifty girls.’ I guess he really did mean it, though.
“Of course most anybody’d rather dance with slender girls than stout girls. I remember a B.F. I had one time in Washington. He said dancing with me was just like dancing with nothing. That sounds like he was insulting me, but it was really a compliment. He meant it wasn’t any effort to dance with me like with some girls. You take Marian, for instance, and while I’m crazy about her, still that don’t make her a good dancer and dancing with her must be a good deal like moving the piano or something.
“I’d die if I was fat! People are always making jokes about fat people. And there’s the old saying, ‘Nobody loves a fat man.’ And it’s even worse with a girl. Besides people making jokes about them and don’t want to dance with them and so forth, besides that they’re always trying to reduce and can’t eat what they want to. I bet, though, if I was fat, I’d eat everything in sight. Though I guess not, either. Because I hardly eat anything as it is. But they do make jokes about them.
“I’ll never forget one day last winter, I was on a case in Great Neck and the man’s wife was the fattest thing! So they had a radio in the house and one day she saw in the paper where Bugs Baer was going to talk on the radio and it would probably be awfully funny because he writes so crazy. Do you ever read his articles? But this woman, she was awfully sensitive about being fat and I nearly died sitting there with her listening to Bugs Baer, because his whole talk was all about some fat woman and he said the craziest things, but I couldn’t laugh on account of she being there in the room with me. One thing he said was that the woman, this woman he was talking about, he said she was so fat that she wore a wrist watch on her thumb. Henry J. Belden.”
“Who is Henry J. Belden? Is that the name of Bugs Baer’s fat lady?”
“No, you crazy!” said Miss Lyons. “Mr. Belden was the case I was on in Great Neck. He died.”
“It seems to me a good many of your cases die.”
“Isn’t it a scream!” said Miss Lyons. “But it’s true; that is, it’s been true lately. The last five cases I’ve been on has all died. Of course it’s just luck, but the girls have been kidding me about it and calling me a jinx, and when Miss Halsey saw me here the evening of the day you was operated, she said, ‘God help him!’ That’s the night floor nurse’s name. But you’re going to be mean and live through it and spoil my record, aren’t you? I’m just kidding. Of course I want you to get all right.
“But it is queer, the way things have happened, and it’s made me feel kind of creepy. And besides, I’m not like some of the girls and don’t care. I get awfully fond of some of my cases and I hate to see them die, especially if they’re men and not very sick and treat you halfway decent and don’t yell for you the minute you go out of the room. There’s only one case I was ever on where I didn’t mind her dying and that was a woman. She had nephritis. Mrs. Judson.
“Do you want some gum? I chew it just when I’m nervous. And I always get nervous when I don’t have enough sleep. You can bet I’ll stay home tonight, B.F. or no B.F. But anyway he’s got an engagement tonight, some directors’ meeting or something. He’s the busiest somebody in the world. And I told him last night, I said, ‘I should think you’d need sleep, too, even more than I do because you have to have all your wits about you in your business or those big bankers would take advantage and rob you. You can’t afford to be sleepy,’ I told him.
“So he said, ‘No, but of course
