The Sick-a-Bed Lady: And Also Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day, Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover, Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only BusinessAbbott, Eleanor Hallowell
General
The Sick-a-Bed Lady: And Also Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day, Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover, Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only Business
Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell
Fiction; Short stories
"Oh, yes," he said; "she got hurt in a runaway accident four years ago.
Lennart doesn't know how to drive a _goat_!"
"Seems sort of too bad," I mused dully.
Then Sagner laughed most astonishingly. "Yes, sort of too bad," he
mocked me.
It was almost ten o'clock when we circled back to the college library.
Only a few grinds were there buzzing like June-bugs round the
low-swinging green lamps. Even the librarian was missing. But Madge
Hubert, the librarian's daughter, was keeping office hours in his stead
behind a sumptuous old mahogany desk. At the very first college party
that I had attended, Madge Hubert had been pointed out to me with a
certain distinction as being the girl that Bertus Sagner was _almost_ in
love with. Then, as now, I was startled by the surprising youthfulness
of her. Surely she was not more than three years ahead of the young girl
whom we had left at Professor Lennart's house. With unmistakable
friendly gladness she welcomed Sagner to the seat nearest her, and
accorded me quite as much chair and quite as much smile as any new man
in a university town really deserved. In another moment she had closed
her book, pushed a full box of matches across the table to us, and
switched off the electric light that fairly threatened to scorch her
straight blond hair.
One by one the grinds looked up and nodded and smiled, and puckered
their vision toward the clock, and "folded their tents like the Arabs
and silently stole away," leaving us two men there all alone with the
great silent room, and the long, rangy, echoing metal book-stacks, and
the duddy-looking portraits, and the dopy-acting busts, and the sleek
gray library cat--and the girl. Maybe Sagner came every Wednesday night
to help close the library.
Certainly I liked the frank, almost boyish manner in which the two
friends included me in their friendship by seeming to ignore me
altogether.
"What's the matter, Bertus?" the girl began quite abruptly. "You look
worried. What's the matter?"
"Nothing is ever the matter," said Sagner.
The girl laughed, and began to build a high, tottering paper tower out
of a learned-looking pack of catalogue cards. Just at the moment of
completion she gave a sharp little inadvertent sigh and the tower
fluttered down.
"What's the matter with _you_?" quizzed Sagner.
"Nothing is ever the matter with me, either," she mocked smilingly.
Trying to butt into the silence that was awkward for me, if not for
them, I rummaged my brain for speech, and blurted out triumphantly,
"We've just come from Professor Lennart's."
"Just come from Professor Lennart's?" she repeated slowly, lifting her
eyebrows as though the thought was a little bit heavy.
"Yes," said Sagner bluntly. "I've been there twice this evening."
With a rather playful twist of her lips the girl turned to me. "What did
you think of 'Little Sister'?" she asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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