“He didn’t seem so optimistic when he was talking to me,” Jean mused. “I suppose he was trying to scare me so I would stay in bed.”
“Of course that was what he intended. Doctors assume patients will do just about half what they are told to do, so they are told to do twice what they need to do,” she encouraged him.
“I’m tired, Mimi—so tired. I think I’ll take a little nap now,” he said after a pause. “I wanted to talk to you because I didn’t know how serious this attack might be tell you to remember, whatever happened, you’re a Daquin, but now I’ve heard what the doctor said, that can wait. You’re a beautiful girl, Mimi, almost too beautiful. But you’ll come through all right—just make up your own mind what’s the right thing to do, pay no attention to what other people say, and then do what you think is right.”
Automatically she thought of Carl.
“Last night, after you and Mrs. Daquin left, Carl came by the house and I called him in,” she told Jean. “He was very unhappy—I never saw him so downcast. We talked awhile—then—then—oh, Jean, he told me he loved me—and it made me mighty happy—”
“Carl’s a good boy, Mimi. A little too flighty—a little weak, too, I’m afraid—but he’ll come around all right, I think. They don’t understand him and they’re always rubbing his fur the wrong way but—Carl’s got the right stuff in him.”
Jean lapsed again into one of his retrospective moods. His eyes slowly closed and soon he fell asleep. Mimi kissed him gently, lowered the shade to keep the light from the street lamp from disturbing him, and stole softly from the room. …