Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/361

 plans, he pictured rather too well the chance of dying, unpleasantly.

When Leora received the idea that he was going off to a death-haunted isle, to a place of strange ways and trees and faces (a place, probably, where they spoke funny languages and didn't have movies or tooth-paste), she took the notion secretively away with her, to look at it and examine it, precisely as she often stole little foods from the table and hid them and meditatively ate them at odd hours of the night, with the pleased expression of a bad child. Martin was glad that she did not add to his qualms by worrying. Then, after three days, she spoke:

"I'm going with you."

"You are not!"

"Well I am!"

"It's not safe."

"Silly! Of course it is. You can shoot your nice old phage into me, and then I'll be absolutely all right. Oh, I have a husband who cures things, I have! I'm going to blow in a lot of money for thin dresses, though I bet St. Hubert isn't any hotter than Dakota can be in August."

"Listen! Lee, darling! Listen! I do think the phage will immunize against the plague—you bet I'll be mighty well injected with it myself!—but I don't know, and even if it were practically perfect, there'd always be some people it wouldn't protect. You simply can't go, sweet. Now I'm terribly sleepy—"

Leora seized his lapels, as comic fierce as a boxing kitten, but her eyes were not comic, nor her wailing voice; age-old wail of the soldiers' women:

"Sandy, don't you know I haven't any life outside of you? I might've had, but honestly, I've been glad to let you absorb me. I'm a lazy, useless, ignorant scut, except as maybe I keep you comfortable. If you were off there, and I didn't know you were all right, or if you died and somebody else cared for your body that I've loved so—haven't I loved it, dear?—I'd go mad. I mean it—can't you see I mean it—I'd go mad! It's just— I'm you, and I got to be with you. And I will help you! Make your media and everything. You know how often I've helped you. Oh, I'm not much good at McGurk, with all your awful' complicated jiggers, but I did help you at Nautilus—I did help you, didn't I?—and maybe in St.