Love Stories | Page 2

and went out. He had not spoken.
It was when his white-linen clad figure went out that Middleton

wakened and found it was the same day. He felt at once like
conversation, and he began immediately. But the morphia did a curious
thing to him. He was never afterward able to explain it. It made him
create. He lay there and invented for Jane Brown a fictitious person,
who was himself. This person, he said, was a newspaper reporter, who
had been sent to report the warehouse fire. He had got too close, and a
wall had come down on him. He invented the newspaper, too, but, as
Jane Brown had come from somewhere else, she did not notice this.
In fact, after a time he felt that she was not as really interested as she
might have been, so he introduced a love element. He was, as has been
said, of those who believe that nurses go into hospitals because of
being blighted. So he introduced a Mabel, suppressing her other name,
and boasted, in a way he afterward remembered with horror, that Mabel
was in love with him. She was, he related, something or other on his
paper.
At the end of two hours of babbling, a businesslike person in a cap--the
Probationer wears no cap--relieved Jane Brown, and spilled some beef
tea down his neck.
Now, Mr. Middleton knew no one in that city. He had been motoring
through, and he had, on seeing the warehouse burning, abandoned his
machine for a closer view. He had left it with the engine running, and,
as a matter of fact, it ran for four hours, when it died of starvation, and
was subsequently interred in a city garage. However, he owned a
number of cars, so he wasted no thought on that one. He was a great
deal more worried about his eyebrows, and, naturally, about his leg.
When he had been in the hospital ten hours it occurred to him to notify
his family. But he put it off for two reasons: first, it would be a lot of
trouble; second, he had no reason to think they particularly wanted to
know. They all had such a lot of things to do, such as bridge and
opening country houses and going to the Springs. They were really
overwhelmed, without anything new, and they had never been awfully
interested in him anyhow.
He was not at all bitter about it.

That night Mr. Middleton--but he was now officially "Twenty-two," by
that system of metonymy which designates a hospital private patient by
the number of his room--that night "Twenty-two" had rather a bad time,
between his leg and his conscience. Both carried on disgracefully. His
leg stabbed, and his conscience reminded him of Mabel, and that if one
is going to lie, there should at least be a reason. To lie out of the whole
cloth----!
However, toward morning, with what he felt was the entire
pharmacopoeia inside him, and his tongue feeling like a tar roof, he
made up his mind to stick to his story, at least as far as the young lady
with the old-fashioned watch was concerned. He had a sort of creed,
which shows how young he was, that one should never explain to a
girl.
There was another reason still. There had been a faint sparkle in the
eyes of the young lady with the watch while he was lying to her. He felt
that she was seeing him in heroic guise, and the thought pleased him. It
was novel.
To tell the truth, he had been getting awfully bored with himself since
he left college. Everything he tried to do, somebody else could do so
much better. And he comforted himself with this, that he would have
been a journalist if he could, or at least have published a newspaper. He
knew what was wrong with about a hundred newspapers.
He decided to confess about Mabel, but to hold fast to journalism. Then
he lay in bed and watched for the Probationer to come back.
However, here things began to go wrong. He did not see Jane Brown
again. There were day nurses and night nurses and reliefs, and internes
and Staff and the Head Nurse and the First Assistant and--everything
but Jane Brown. And at last he inquired for her.
"The first day I was in here," he said to Miss Willoughby, "there was a
little girl here without a cap. I don't know her name. But I haven't seen
her since."

Miss Willoughby, who, if she had been disappointed in love, had
certainly had time to forget it, Miss Willoughby reflected.
"Without a cap? Then it was only one of the probationers."
"You don't remember which one?"
But she only observed that probationers were