Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/217

 close 'em. And to use the word 'science' in those flop-eared limericks or whatever you call 'em—it's sacrilege!"

"Well, if you want to know, Martin Arrowsmith, I'll have no more of these high jinks with that Orchid girl! Practically hugging her when you came downstairs, and then mooning at her all evening! I don't mind your cursing and being cranky and even getting drunk, in a reasonable sort of way, but ever since the lunch when you told me and that Fox woman, 'I hope you girls won't mind, but I just happen to remember that I'm engaged to both of you'— You're mine, and I won't have any trespassers. I'm a cavewoman, and you'd better learn it, and as for that Orchid, with her simper and her stroking your arm and her great big absurd feet— Orchid! She's no orchid! She's a bachelor's button!"

"But, honest, I don't even remember which of the eight she was."

"Huh! Then you've been making love to all of 'em, that's why. Drat her! Well, I'm not going to go on scrapping about it. I just wanted to warn you, that's all."

At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short, jovial, convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with Orchid, he stammered, "If you don't mind, I think I'll stay down and walk a little more. I've got to figure this health department business out."

He sat in the Sims House office—singularly dismal it was, after midnight, and singularly smelly.

"That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I'd told him right out that we know hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis, for instance.

"Just the same, she's a darling child. Orchid! She's like an orchid—no, she's too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting with. Sweet. And she acted as if I were her own age, not an old doctor. I'll be good, oh, I'll be good, but— I'd like to kiss her once, good! She likes me. Those darling lips, like—like rosebuds!

"Poor Leora. I nev' was so astonished in my life. Jealous. Well, she's got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man like— Lee, sweet, can't you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner with seventeen billion Orchids, it'd be you I loved, and never anybody but you!

"I can't go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette