Cherry Ames, Visiting Nurse by Helen Wells

Author:Helen Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Publishing Company
Published: 2007-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

Parties and Clues

JOSIE FRANKLIN HAD A BEAU. HE WAS A YOUNG DOCTOR she had met through her work and his name was John Brent. Young as the girls themselves, he was easygoing enough to be amused rather than ruffled by Josie’s rattlebrained remarks. In fact, not even a houseful of girls could ruffle Dr. Johnny. He would sit peacefully on their living-room sofa, chuckling at Josie’s non sequiturs, and ducking the scramble of six nurses with no more protest than a grin. Or if Dr. Johnny took Josie to the movies, he comfortably invited the whole Spencer Club too. Dr. John Brent was showing up at the apartment more and more frequently.

“Josie has a beau, Josie has a beau,” Gwen chanted. It was Sunday noon, and the girls were loafing over a combination breakfast-lunch. “Well, it’s about time one of us had a nice new romance.”

“It isn’t a romance and Johnny isn’t a beau.” Josie blinked behind her glasses. “He just likes me. Some. That’s all.”

“Oh,” said Vivian. “I suppose Dr. Johnny sits on our sofa because he can’t think of anything better to do? He comes around to call on the entire Spencer Club?”

“He likes our peppermints and our pretty wallpaper.” Cherry grinned. “He doesn’t like Josie, oh, no.”

Josie wrinkled her forehead and turned to quiet little Mai Lee for help.

“Is he really a beau, Mai Lee?”

Mai Lee smiled. “I think Johnny likes you better than you realize.”

Josie wonderingly set down her cup. “Well, what do you know! But honestly, I think he has fun with the whole gang of us.”

Bertha returned with a fresh pot of coffee. “I miss my John. He keeps writing that I should come back to the farm and marry him, that we’ve been waiting long enough.” Bertha’s china-blue eyes had a faraway look. It was one of the rare times that Bertha spoke of her fiancé, with whom she had grown up.

Cherry, winding one black curl around her finger, wondered about her own romance department. It was conspicuous by its absence. Wade Cooper was a highly satisfactory young man, but he was out of the Air Forces now and back home in Tucson, hard at work starting a business. And there simply was no one else at the moment.

Cherry looked around speculatively at the other girls. Gwen knew someone she liked but he was in St. Louis. Mai Lee and Vivian were as lacking in dates, here in New York, as Cherry was.

“Hey, kids. You know what?” Cherry said slowly. “I just thought about this for the first time—We’ve all been so busy with our work that I guess we haven’t done any thinking at all.”

“Thinking about what?” Cherry’s serious tone caught their attention.

“Just this. That except for Josie, we haven’t any beaux or callers or friends. That—darn it!—we’re all wrapped up in ourselves and our work. We never see anyone socially but one another.” She shook back her dark curls. “I’ve just waked up to the awful truth. We’re getting—uh—”

“Narrow,” Mai Lee supplied.

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