How interesting his life at sea must have been. (She had definitely ticketed him as a sailor.) Lives at sea were always interesting. All the best books were in accord with that. You never read of a Main Street on the ocean. What with the girls in every port and the fights and the smell of crisp salt air … What a wretched little twirp that boy had been down at the beach last summer, with his absurd remarks about the salt smell being a lot of decayed lobster pots and dead fish. Of course the air at sea was salt. Sea and salt were synonymous.
Mr. Hollander did have the fidgets.
She couldn’t see exactly, because of the masking arm of the chair, but he certainly was fiddling with something. She’d think he was twirling his thumbs, if he looked like the sort of man who twirled thumbs, but he didn’t, so it wasn’t that.
She looked at her wrist watch and saw that the hands were approaching the half hour. She’d have to examine her patient and note his pulse on the chart. What a pity that the only time you really felt comfortable in an overstuffed chair was at the moment when you had to get up.
She stood up, smoothed starched surfaces, and sailed, a smart white pinnace, toward the bed. She smiled engagingly at Mr. Hollander and then started to take Endicott’s pulse. She gave a slight start and concentrated her full attention upon Endicott.
“I think there’s a change.”
Hollander looked up at her alertly. “Change?”
“I think he shows signs of coming to.”
Miss Murrow wondered a moment at the tight little lines which suddenly appeared on Hollander’s face, hardening and aging it rather shockingly, and altering the features into a cast whose hidden significance