IX
He never knew it but for an hour, in their cabin half-lighted from the lamps in their sitting-room beyond, she watched him sleeping.
He was not handsome; he was grotesque as a puppy napping on a hot afternoon. His hair was ruffled, his face was deep in the crumpled pillow he had encircled with both his arms. She looked at him, smiling, with the stretched corners of her lips like tiny flung arrows.
“I do love him so when he’s frowsy! Don’t you see, Sandy, I was wise to come! You’re so worn out. It might get you, and nobody but me could nurse you. Nobody knows all your cranky ways—about how you hate prunes and everything. Night and day I’ll nurse you—the least whisper and I’ll be awake. And if you need ice bags and stuff—And I’ll have ice, too, if I have to sneak into some millionaire’s house and steal it out of his highballs! My dear!”
She shifted the electric fan so that it played more upon him, and on soft toes she crept into their stiff sitting-room. It did not contain much save a round table, a few chairs, and a Sybaritic glass and mahogany wall-cabinet whose purpose was never discovered.
“It’s so sort of—Aah! Pinched. I guess maybe I ought to fix it up somehow.”
But she had no talent for the composing of chairs and pictures which brings humanness into a dead room. Never in her life had she spent three minutes in arranging flowers. She looked doubtful, she smiled and turned out the light, and slipped in to him.
She lay on the coverlet of her berth, in the tropic languidness, a slight figure in a frivolous nightgown. She thought, “I like a small bedroom, because Sandy is nearer and I don’t get so scared by things. What a dratted bully the man is! Some day I’m going to up and say to him: ‘You go to the devil!’ I will so! Darling, we will hike off to France together, just you and I, won’t we!”
She was asleep, smiling, so thin a little figure—