Bobbie: General Manager by Olive Higgins Prouty

Author:Olive Higgins Prouty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
Published: 2021-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XV

Four months later. Twelve o’clock at night. Wrapped up in my eiderdown bath-robe. Sitting at my desk.

It is midnight. I cannot sleep. I have been lying wide awake, listening to a strong April wind, howling around the corner of the house, for two hours! I’ve repeated the twenty-third Psalm over and over again. I’ve imagined a flock of sheep going over a stile (though I never saw it done) for ten minutes solid. I’ve swallowed two Veronal tablets. It’s useless. I surrender. I don’t want to get up. I shall have an awful headache to-morrow, besides heavy lead weights behind my eyes; and to-morrow—to-morrow of all days—I want to be fresh and bright and as beautiful as nature can make me. Moreover, I’d rather not write. But I can’t read. There has never been a book printed that could hold my thoughts to-night. My mind goes back to the events of the day like steel to a magnet. I’ve tried solitaire, and ended by pushing the silly cards on the floor. You see something has happened—something big and actual and real!

I have seen Dr. Maynard!

I have met him face to face, talked with him, laughed with him, walked with him from Charles Street to the sunken garden, sat with him by the fountain. I am beside myself with excitement. I had better tell how it all happened. If I get it out of my system I may be able to snatch a little sleep, and I must sleep. I have an important engagement to-morrow at three.

It occurred at four o’clock this afternoon. I had bought a bunch of primroses from a man on the street five minutes before. I was on my way home from a shopping tour, and with my pretty early-spring flowers tucked in at my waist, and my hands full of packages, I turned up Charles Street as unconcerned as you please. At the corner I bowed to our minister’s wife, and the remains of the smile were still on my face, I suppose, when I saw Dr. Maynard. I didn’t know that he was on this side of the ocean, and when I observed him coming down the steps of the postoffice—vigorous and strong and buoyant—I stood still in my tracks, and the remains of the smile turned into something startled and afraid. Dr. Maynard approached me all aglow, stretched out his hand and took mine in a warm, firm grasp. A thrill went through me like a knife. He was as natural as day, beautifully tanned, smiling, big, broad-shouldered as ever, and yet different—oh, awfully different.

“Hello, Bobbie,” he said in his hearty old voice, and I looked back at him, perfectly white—I could feel that I was—and speechless. “Don’t be a goose. It’s just Dr. Maynard,” I tried to reason with myself.

“Am I speaking to Miss Lucy Vars?” I heard asked of me. “Miss Lucy Chenery Vars, of 240 Main Street, Hilton, Mass.?”

I nodded, and somewhere down there in the chaos in my chest, I found my poor little voice.

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