Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one &
1/2 Mont but i dont get better so i like to heir Wat
you tink about it i feel like dis Disconfebil feeling
around the Stomac after eating and dat Pain around
Heard and down the arm and about 3 to 3 1/2 Hour after
Eating i feel weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig.
Now you gust lett mee know Wat you tink about mee,
i do Wat you say.
She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store.
He looked at her as though he had a right to; he spoke
softly. “I haven’t see you, the last
few days.”
“No. I’ve been out in the country
with Will several times. He’s so——Do
you know that people like you and me can never understand
people like him? We’re a pair of hypercritical
loafers, you and I, while he quietly goes and does
things.”
She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing
boric acid. He stared after her, and slipped
away.
When she found that he was gone she was slightly disconcerted.
She could—at times—agree with
Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets familiarity
of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome
frankness; that artificial reticences might merely
be irritating. She was not much disturbed when
for hours he sat about the living-room in his honest
socks. But she would not listen to his theory
that “all this romance stuff is simply moonshine—elegant
when you’re courting, but no use busting yourself
keeping it up all your life.”
She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days.
She knitted an astounding purple scarf, which she
hid under his supper plate. (When he discovered it
he looked embarrassed, and gasped, “Is today
an anniversary or something? Gosh, I’d
forgotten it!”)
Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee a
corn-flakes box with cookies just baked by Bea, and
bustled to his office at three in the afternoon.
She hid her bundles in the hall and peeped in.
The office was shabby. Kennicott had inherited
it from a medical predecessor, and changed it only
by adding a white enameled operating-table, a sterilizer,
a Roentgen-ray apparatus, and a small portable typewriter.
It was a suite of two rooms: a waiting-room with
straight chairs, shaky pine table, and those coverless
and unknown magazines which are found only in the
offices of dentists and doctors. The room beyond,
looking on Main Street, was business-office, consulting-room,
operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological
and chemical laboratory. The wooden floors of
both rooms were bare; the furniture was brown and
scaly.
Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as
though they were paralyzed, and a man in a railroad
brakeman’s uniform, holding his bandaged right
hand with his tanned left. They stared at Carol.
She sat modestly in a stiff chair, feeling frivolous
and out of place.
