The Secret Places of the HeartWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Secret Places of the Heart
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
England -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Psychological fiction
Sir Richmond’s bedroom was a large apartment in which sleep seemed to
have been an admitted necessity rather than a principal purpose. On one
hand it opened into a business-like dressing and bath room, on the other
into the day study. It bore witness to the nocturnal habits of a man who
had long lived a life of irregular impulses to activity and dislocated
hours and habits. There was a desk and reading lamp for night work near
the fireplace, an electric kettle for making tea at night, a silver
biscuit tin; all the apparatus for the lonely intent industry of the
small hours. There was a bookcase of bluebooks, books of reference and
suchlike material, and some files. Over the mantelpiece was an enlarged
photograph of Lady Hardy and a plain office calendar. The desk was
littered with the galley proofs of the Minority Report upon which Sir
Richmond had been working up to the moment of his hasty retreat to bed.
And lying among the proofs, as though it had been taken out and looked
at quite recently was the photograph of a girl. For a moment Dr.
Martineau’s mind hung in doubt and then he knew it for the young
American of Stonehenge. How that affair had ended he did not know. And
now it was not his business to know.
These various observations printed themselves on Dr. Martineau’s mind
after his first cursory examination of his patient and while he cast
about for anything that would give this large industrious apartment a
little more of the restfulness and comfort of a sick room. “I must
get in a night nurse at once,” he said. “We must find a small table
somewhere to put near the bed.
“I am afraid you are very ill,” he said, returning to the bedside. “This
is not, as you say, my sort of work. Will you let me call in another
man, a man we can trust thoroughly, to consult?”
“I’m in your hands, said Sir Richmond. I want to pull through.”
“He will know better where to get the right sort of nurse for the
case--and everything.”
The second doctor presently came, with the right sort of nurse hard on
his heels. Sir Richmond submitted almost silently to his expert handling
and was sounded and looked to and listened at.
“H’m,” said the second doctor, and then encouragingly to Sir Richmond:
“We’ve got to take care of you.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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