“But you are an invalid yourself,” objected Miss Brown jealously. “You had better go back to bed.”
“Doh, she is dot ad idvalid, she’s a suffragette,” whined Albert. “I doad’t wish her to go back to bed.”
Even Albert, with his wide range of scientific ways of being inconvenient, could scarcely have chosen a more impossible moment for an illness. Next day it became apparent that every doctor on the Island who had survived the disaster had plunged into the whirlpool of its after effects. Nursing on the Island is in a rudimentary stage at all times, but what nurses existed were not to be dragged now from Union Town.
The lady novelist said: “I know I must appear heartless, dear Margaret, not to be helping to nurse him, but the sight of suffering gives me such acute pain.... It’s not heartlessness, you see, it’s that my heart is too tender.”
“I wish she would go to an hotel then,” said the harassed Miss Brown to the suffragette. “She wants her meals so good and so regular, and I seem to hate the sight of food just now.”
It was against the suffragette’s principles to hope anything so desirable without translating her hope into action. It was also beyond her powers to be diplomatic.
“I think you had better go to the hotel,” she said militantly to the lady novelist. “You would be better fed there, and we should be more comfortable alone.”
“In that case perhaps I had better, not being welcome in my friend’s house,” replied the novelist. “I was going to suggest it myself, as the sound of that priceless child’s cries wrings my heart.”
The suffragette therefore gained her point at the expense of tact, which, as future historians will note, is a characteristic of suffragettes.
Albert’s temperament was not that of the Spartan. He never ceased to cry for a week. As for the pain, it was as if the god—whoever he may be—who likes little children to suffer, sat beside him, and with a blunt shears sliced off the top of each breath.