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It frightened her, so that Pat had to begin four times before her voice faintly took up the tune. Again Burlingham's encouraging, confident gaze, flung across the gap between them like a strong rescuing hand, strengthened her to her task.
Her face was ghastly when she entered the office of the hospital and left Burlingham's parcel. The clerk at the desk told her that Burlingham was in the same condition "and there'll be probably no change one way or the other for several days." She returned to the street, wandered aimlessly about. She knew she ought to eat something, but the idea of food revolted her.
She had first seen it when she and the night porter broke into Burlingham's room in the Walnut Street House, in Cincinnati.
Nor had she forgotten Burlingham's lectures on the subject with illustrations from his own spoiled career; she understood it all now and everything else he had given her to store up in her memory that retained everything. With that philippic against optimism in mind, she felt what Spenser was rushing toward.
"I'll only take what's fair," said the girl. "I vote we give it all to her," rolled out Tempest in tragedy's tone for classic satire. Before Mabel could hurl at him the probably coarse retort she instantly got her lips ready to make, Burlingham's cool, peace-compelling tones broke in: "Miss Sackville's right. She must get only what's fair. She shares equally from tonight on less two dollars."
Burlingham's gas was lighted; he was sitting up in bed a haggard, disheveled, insane man, raving on and on names of men and women she had never heard oaths, disjointed sentences. "Brain fever, I reckon," said the porter. "I'll call a doctor." In a few minutes Susan was gladdened by the sight of a young man wearing the familiar pointed beard and bearing the familiar black bag.
Her voice was deliciously young and had the pathetic quality that is never absent from anything which has enduring charm for us. Tears were in Burlingham's voice tears for the fate of the maiden, tears of response to the haunting pathos of Susan's sweet contralto, tears of joy at the acquisition of such a "number" for his program.
But for it, I might have gone on to make a fool of myself." And she recalled how it had been one of Burlingham's favorite maxims that everything is for the best, for those who know how to use it. SHE wrote Garvey asking an appointment. The reply should have come the next day or the next day but one at the farthest; for Garvey had been trained by Brent to the supreme courtesy of promptness.
For in spite of Burlingham's explanations and cautionings she was still the small-town girl, unsuspicious toward courtesy from strange men. Also, she longed for someone to talk with. It had been weeks since she had talked with anyone nearer than Burlingham to her own age and breeding. "Won't you have lunch with me?" he asked. "I hate to eat alone."
Hoarse whispering; then in Burlingham's voice stern and gruff "Get back to your bed and let her alone, you rolling-eyed " The sentence ended with as foul a spatter of filth as man can fling at man. Silence again, and after a few minutes the two snores resumed their bass accompaniment to the falsetto of the mosquito chorus.
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