"Put that with your marriage certificate," he said to Lilian, folding up the will and offering it to her. "I think I’ll get back to bed. Exhausting work, being married!" He laughed shortly. "I’m going to sleep," he said later, after he had eaten and drunk. "You be off downstairs and have your lunch."
But, of course, she could not go downstairs. She dropped into her bed, staggered by the swift evolution of her career. Staggered by it! Lo! She was a typewriting girl wearing wristlets, poor, hopeless, with no prospects. A little while, and lo! she was the wife of a rich and brilliant adorer, and an honest man in whom her trust was absolute. And she was pregnant. Strange fear invaded her mind, the ancient fear that too much happiness is a crime that destiny will punish.
"Felix seriously ill; double pneumonia; we are married.--Lilian Grig." Ten words, plus Isabel’s address and her own! She wrote the telegram after several trials, in her bedroom, on half a sheet of the hotel notepaper, Kate O’Connor standing by her side, the next morning but one.
"Give it me," said the white nurse. "I’ll see to it for you, Mrs. Grig, as I go home."
She looked up at the nurse, and the nurse, eyes no longer laughing, looked down at her. The nurse knew everything, and, moreover, must have assisted at scores of tragedies; yet Lilian regarded her as an innocent who understood nothing essential in life. Her comforting kiss was like the kiss of a very capable child pretending to be grown up.
Voices in the other bedroom! The doctor had arrived and was talking to the second nurse. They went in together. Felix lay a changed man, horribly aged. He was a man who had suddenly learned that in order to live it was necessary to breathe, and that breathing may be an intensely difficult operation of mechanics. His lined, wrinkled face was drawn with the awful anxieties incident to breathing, and with the acute pain in both lungs. The enemy was growing in strength and Felix was losing strength, but he could not surrender. He must continue to struggle, despite the odds, and there was no referee to stop the fight, either on the ground that it had developed into an assassination or on any other ground. The brutality had to proceed. And the sun streamed through the window; and outside, from the promenade where the idlers were strolling and the band was playing, the window looked exactly the same as all the other windows of the enormous hotel.