That Mrs. Hetherington seems to think I'm a private sort of
lady's maid to her alone. All these women do--sitting about in deck
chairs calling 'Steward' all day long! In the third class alone there's
six stewards in hospital! And only yesterday I caught it from the Chief
because the cutlery hadn't been polished--not that that's my job at all,
really--"
The next moment Knollys fell over in a dead faint, and copying what she
had seen him do when passengers fainted, Marcella fetched a pillow from
her cabin, laid it under his back on the floor and left him while she
polished the cutlery. Louis found her there and they came near to
fighting about it.
"What on earth are you doing?" he asked in amazement.
"Poor Knollys has gone down," she said, thinking that adequate
explanation.
Louis looked at him casually. Marcella was coming to understand that he
looked upon illness with a certain hardness and lack of pity that
surprised her; he was immensely interested in it, he liked to dabble in
it, but not from a passion of healing nearly so much as from curiosity
and technical interest. To him, in illness, curing the patient mattered
infinitely less than beating the disease. He had a queer snobbishness
about illness, too, that amazed her. To him Knollys, a steward, ill
meant infinitely less than the illness of a member of his own class
would have meant.
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