“Get your legs back in bed.” The kindly Helen thrust back the protruding limbs, thereby wringing from the sufferer a muffled shriek which brought Maud Raines to the scene.
“It’s rheumatism, I think,” explained Helen to the newcomer. “Or else paralysis.”
Racked by all manner of darting pains and convulsive cramps, Darcy began the cautious process of emerging from bed. “Do be good—ugh!” she implored. “And don’t—ooch!—ask questions—and draw me a boiling hot bath—ow-w-w!—and help me into it—oh-h-h-h—_dear!_”
Greatly wondering they followed the sufferer’s directions, got her duly en-tubbed, and ensconced themselves outside the door, which they left carefully ajar for explanations. All they got for this maneuver was an avowal of the bather’s firm intention of spending the rest of the day in the mollifying water.
“If you want to be really nice,” she added, “you might bring my coffee and rolls to me here.”
“Well, really!” said Maud indignantly, for this was a reversal of the normal order of things in Bachelor-Girls’ Hall. As the homely member of an otherwise attractive trio, Darcy had been, by common consent, constituted the meek and unprotesting servitor of the other two. Thus do relics of Orientalism persist among the most independent race of women known to history.
Darcy accepted the rebuff. “It doesn’t matter,” said she, with a quaver of self-pity. “I can’t have coffee. I can’t have hot rolls. I can’t have anything.”
Her two mates exchanged glances. “Darcy, you’ve got to see a doctor.”
“I’m much better now. Really I am,” declared the other, alarmed at the threat of a physician, who might suspect the truth and give her away to the others. “I’m going to dress.” Which she did, at the price of untold pangs. Breakfast passed in a succession of questioning silences and suspicious glances, but Darcy guarded her tongue. To reveal the facts and what lay behind them would be only to invite discouragement and dissuasion if not actual ridicule. After the frugal and tasteless ordeal of hominy without sugar, followed by one egg without butter, she limped into the front room and set herself doggedly to the elaboration of a new design for B. Riegel & Sons. Notwithstanding the legacy, she could not afford to neglect the economic side of life whilst fostering the physical. Her special course in the development of charm, via the muscle-and-sinew route, she perceived, was going to take longer than she had foreseen. Already she felt that the schedule ought to be radically relaxed. Her unfitness to take the lesson set for that afternoon was obvious. Next week, perhaps—’though, on the whole, she inclined to the belief that she should have about ten days to recuperate.