Alice Adams

								


Produced by Charles Keller

ALICE ADAMS
By Booth Tarkington

CHAPTER I
The patient, an old-fashioned man, thought the nurse made a mistake in
keeping both of the windows open, and her sprightly disregard of his
protests added something to his hatred of her. Every evening he told her
that anybody with ordinary gumption ought to realize that night air was
bad for the human frame. “The human frame won't stand everything,
Miss Perry,” he warned her, resentfully. “Even a child, if it had just
ordinary gumption, ought to know enough not to let the night air blow on
sick people yes, nor well people, either! 'Keep out of the night air, no
matter how well you feel.' That's what my mother used to tell me when I
was a boy. 'Keep out of the night air, Virgil,' she'd say. 'Keep out of
the night air.'”
“I expect probably her mother told her the same thing,” the nurse
suggested.
“Of course she did. My grandmother----”
“Oh, I guess your GRANDmother thought so, Mr. Adams! That was when all
this flat central country was swampish and hadn't been drained off yet.
I guess the truth must been the swamp mosquitoes bit people and gave 'em
malaria, especially before they began to put screens in their windows.
Well, we got screens in these windows, and no mosquitoes are goin' to
bite us; so just you be a good boy and rest your mind and go to sleep
like you need to.”
“Sleep?” he said. “Likely!”
He thought the night air worst of all in April; he hadn't a doubt it
would kill him, he declared. “It's miraculous what the human frame WILL
survive,” he admitted on the last evening of that month. “But you and
the doctor ought to both be taught it won't stand too dang much! You
poison a man and poison and poison him with this April night air----”
“Can't poison you with much more of it,” Miss Perry interrupted him,
indulgently. “To-morrow it'll be May night air, and I expect that'll be
a lot better for you, don't you? Now let's just sober down and be a good
boy and get some nice sound sleep.”
She gave him his medicine, and, having set the glass upon the center
table, returned to her cot, where, after a still interval, she snored
faintly. Upon this, his expression became that of a man goaded out of
overpowering weariness into irony.
“Sleep? Oh, CERTAINLY, thank you!”
However, he did sleep intermittently, drowsed between times, and even
dreamed; but, forgetting his dreams before he opened his eyes, and
having some part of him all the while aware of his discomfort, he
believed, as usual, that he lay awake the whole night long. He was
conscious of the city as of some single great creature resting fitfully
in the dark outside his windows. It lay all round about, in the damp
cover of its night cloud of smoke, and tried to keep quiet for a few
hours after midnight, but was too powerful a growing thing ever to
lie altogether still. Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with