Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/369

 like the one I told you last week—I said I hadn't eaten any candy and didn't have a stomach-ache, and I'd eaten half a pound and I was sick as a pup Gosh, I'm a good wife I am!"

They rolled from gray seas to purple and silver. By dusk they stood at the rail, and he felt the spaciousness of the sea, of life. Always he had lived in his imagination. As he had blundered through crowds, an inconspicuous young husband trotting out to buy cold roast beef for dinner, his brain-pan had been wide as the domed sky. He had seen not the streets, but microörganisms large as jungle monsters, miles of flasks cloudy with bacteria, himself giving orders to his garçon, Max Gottlieb awesomely congratulating him. Always his dreams had clung about his work. Now, no less passionately, he awoke to the ship, the mysterious sea, the presence of Leora, and he cried to her, in the warm tropic winter dusk:

"Sweet, this is only the first of our big hikes! Pretty soon, if I'm successful in St. Hubert, I'll begin to count in science, and we'll go abroad, to your France and England and Italy and everywhere!"

"Can we, do you think? Oh, Sandy! Going places!"

He never knew it but for an hour, in their cabin half-lighted from the lamps in their sitting-room beyond, she watched him sleeping.

He was not handsome; he was grotesque as a puppy napping on a hot afternoon. His hair was ruffled, his face was deep in the crumpled pillow he had encircled with both his arms. She looked at him, smiling, with the stretched corners of her lips like tiny flung arrows.

"I do love him so when he's frowsy! Don't you see, Sandy, I was wise to come! You're so worn out. It might get you, and nobody but me could nurse you. Nobody knows all your cranky ways—about how you hate prunes and everything. Night and day I'll nurse you—the least whisper and I'll be awake. And if you need ice bags and stuff— And I'll have ice, too, if I have to sneak into some millionaire's house and Steal it out of his highballs! My dear!"

She shifted the electric fan so that it played more upon him, and on soft toes she crept into their stiff sitting-room.