“Don’t you remember the famous painter who told inquiring visitors that he mixed his paints with brains?  I am now cooking with my mind.  After my mind learns to cook, my hands will find it simple enough.  And some time, when you come in at midnight and have had no dinner, and the immigrant has long since gone to sleep, you may be glad to be presented with panned oysters, piping hot, instead of a can of salmon and a can-opener.”

“Bless your heart,” answered Allan, fondly.  “It’s dear of you, and I hope it’ll work.  I’m starving this minute—­kiss me.”

“‘Longing is divine compared with satiety,’” she reminded him, as she yielded.  “How could you get away?  Was nobody ill?”

“Nobody would have the heart to be ill on a Saturday in June, when a doctor’s best girl was only fifty miles away.  Monday, I’ll go back and put some cholera or typhoid germs in the water supply, and get nice and busy.  Who’s up yonder?” indicating the hotel.

“Nobody we know, but very few of the guests have come, so far.”

[Sidenote:  “Guests”]

“In all our varied speech,” commented Allan, “I know of nothing so exquisitely ironical as alluding to the people who stop at a hotel as ‘guests.’  In Mexico, they call them ‘passengers,’ which is more in keeping with the facts.  Fancy the feelings of a real guest upon receiving a bill of the usual proportions.  I should consider it a violation of hospitality if a man at my house had to pay three prices for his dinner and a tip besides.”

“You always had queer notions,” remarked Eloise, with a sidelong glance which set his heart to pounding.  “We’ll call them inmates if you like it better.  As yet, there are only eight inmates besides ourselves, though more are coming next week.  Two old couples, one widow, one divorcee, and two spinsters with life-works.”

“No galloping cherubs?”

“School isn’t out yet.”

[Sidenote:  Life-Works]

“I see.  It wouldn’t be the real thing unless there were little ones to gallop through the corridors at six in the morning and weep at the dinner table.  What are the life-works?”

“One is writing a book, I understand, on The Equality of the Sexes.  The other—­oh, Allan, it’s too funny.”

“Spring it,” he demanded.

“She’s trying to have cornet-playing introduced into the public schools.  She says that tuberculosis and pneumonia are caused by insufficient lung development, and that cornet-playing will develop the lungs of the rising generation.  Fancy going by a school during the cornet hour.”

“I don’t know why they shouldn’t put cornet-playing into the schools,” he observed, after a moment of profound thought.  “Everything else is there now.  Why shouldn’t they teach crime, and even make a fine art of it?”

“If you let her know you’re a doctor,” cautioned Eloise, “she’ll corner you, and I shall never see you again.  She says that she ’hopes, incidentally, to enlist the sympathies of the medical profession.’”