A Woman's War. Warwick Deeping
Porteus romped across the grass to poke his wrinkled face into the oval of the Dutch bonnet.
“Hallo, who says senna to-night? What! Miss Gwendolen Murchison approves of senna!”
“I’ve won that sixpence, godpa.”
“Indeed, sir, I think not.”
“Jack can have the sixpence; it’s his buffday to-morrow.”
“A lady who likes senna and renounces sixpences! Go to, Master John, you must run to Mr. Parsons, the clockmaker, and buy godma a pair of new spectacles.”
“Spectacles!” and Master Jack mouthed his scorn.
“A sad day for us, Miss Carmagee, when babies sit upon our infirmities!”
Parker Steel dropped into his Roxton tailor’s that same afternoon to have a summer suit fitted. The proprietor, an urbane and bald-headed person with the deportment of a diplomat, rubbed his hands and remarked that professional duties must be very exacting in the heat of June.
“Your colleague, I understand, sir—Dr. Murchison, sir—has had an attack from overwork; sunstroke, they say.”
“What! Sunstroke?”
“So I have been informed, sir.”
“Indeed!”
“Or an attack of faintness. Dr. Murchison is a most laborious worker. Four buttons, thank you; a breast-pocket, as before, certainly. Any fancy vestings to-day, doctor? No! Greatly obliged, sir, I’m sure,” and the diplomat dodged to the door and swung it open with a bow.
Parker Steel found his wife reading under the Indian cedar in the garden. She was dressed in white, with a red rose in her bosom, the green shadows of the trees and shrubs about her casting a sleek sheen over her olive face and dusky hair. Poets might have written odes to her, hailing the slim sweetness of her womanliness, using the lily as a symbol of her beauty and the Madonna-like radiance of her spiritual face.
She glanced up at her husband as he came spruce and complacent, like any Agag, over the grass.
“Murchison has had a sunstroke.”
“What! Who told you?”
“Rudyard, the tailor.”
The book was lying deprecatingly at Mrs. Betty’s feet. Her eyes swept from her husband to dwell reflectively on the scarlet pomp of the Oriental poppies.
“Do you think it was a sunstroke, Parker?”
Her husband glanced at his neat boots and whistled.
“What a melodramatic mind you have,” he said.
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