She had taken off her turban, and her hair was silky and honey-colored, her eyes were blue, her face childish. There was nothing of the slavey in her. He could imagine her running down hillsides, shinning up a sack of straw.

“Oh,” she said gravely. “I didn’t mean to be rude then. I was just — Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought you were awfully nice, and I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did seem so young for a doctor.”

“I’m not. I’m a medic. I was showing off.”

“So was I!”

He felt an instant and complete comradeship with her, a relation free from the fencing and posing of his struggle with Madeline. He knew that this girl was of his own people. If she was vulgar, jocular, unreticent, she was also gallant, she was full of laughter at humbugs, she was capable of a loyalty too casual and natural to seem heroic. His voice was lively, though his words were only:

“Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess.”

“Not so awful, but it’s just as romantic as being a hired girl — that’s what we call ’em in Dakota.”

“Come from Dakota?”

“I come from the most enterprising town — three hundred and sixty-two inhabitants — in the entire state of North Dakota — Wheatsylvania. Are you in the U. medic school?”

To a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed absorbed in hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she by her scrubbing pail. She had reassumed her turban; its bagginess obscured her bright hair.

“Yes, I’m a Junior medic in Mohalis. But — I don’t know. I’m not much of a medic. I like the lab side. I think I’ll be a bacteriologist, and raise Cain with some of the fool theories of immunology. And I don’t think much of the bedside manner.”

“I glad you don’t. You get it here. You ought to hear some of the docs that are the sweetest old pussies with their patients — the way they bawl out the nurses. But labs — they seem sort of real. I don’t suppose you can bluff a bacteria — what is it?— bacterium?”

“No, they’re — What do they call you?”

“Me? Oh, it’s an idiotic name — Leora Tozer.”

“What’s the matter with Leora? It’s fine.”

Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and make them anything but hackneyed? And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient sounds was the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour when each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely missed, discovered now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bouncing rustics, like prince and princess. Their words were silly and inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together they were as wise and important as the tides or the sounding wind.

He told her that he admired Max Gottlieb, that he had crossed her North Dakota on a train, and that he was an excellent hockey-player. She told him that she “adored” vaudeville, that her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, was born in the East (by which she meant Illinois), and that she didn’t particularly care for nursing. She had no especial personal ambition; she had come here because she liked adventure. She hinted, with debonair regret, that she was not too popular with the superintendent of nurses; she meant to be good but somehow she was always dragged into rebellions connected with midnight fudge or elopements. There was nothing heroic in her story but from her placid way of telling it he had an impression of gay courage.

He interrupted with an urgent, “When can you get away from the hospital for dinner? Tonight?”

“Why —”

“Please!”

“All right.”

“When can I call for you?”

“Do you think I ought to — Well, seven.”

All the way back to Mohalis he alternately raged and rejoiced.