Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET 137
her hat and ruffled her hair, sitting with that long,
drooping line of figure and limb that the Attic
sculptors remembered, carving their Victories and
their Her as. Adrian scowled at her inquiringly and
she smiled at him.
“We’re neither of us visitors. Dr. Adrian. We are
patients.”
She speaks English more faultless than mine,
because more colloquial, but has still that slight
difficulty of the Slav when confronted with the
English “w”. But she made of it a musical difficulty,
so that the ooe” for “we” was a lovely mispro¬
nunciation—or so I thought, and sighed at that
reflection upon myself, for I found Pelagueya lovely
even at her most stupid and reckless. But Adrian
was regarding her incredulously, having no fine
appreciations in phonetics.
“Patients ? Neither of you look so.”
I said : “But we are. And our disease is serious,
m7 §ood Adrian. So if you will abandon the
so-urgent manuscript of ‘Fifty Years a Physician in
Cairo’ we will relate to you the symptoms.”
He coloured a little, pushing aside the papers in
fr°nt of him. Only some notes. . . .” He became
the physician, glancing from one to the other of us.
“Go ahead.”
“Our trouble is this little matter of human nature ”
“Eh ?”
“What we want to know is : Is there anything on
earth that will act as a measure of the Good Life,
and how may we find it ?”