human
If it weren't that you failed to come in with any superfluous advice, I should say that you had been a nurse--you seem to have the instinct. You take hold, somehow, and make no fuss.
gpt
Why should I? she asked,
human
She's resting. It isn't every elderly lady who can get a compartment from the Pullman Company for the price of a seat. She was put on at Albany by one set of grandchildren and she's to be taken off at Boston by another set. And she's old and her heart's a little sluggish--self-sacrifice goes downward not upward, through the generations, I observe--though I'm a young physician at that!
gpt
I don't know your name, I think--mine is Annette Markham.
human
Dr. W.H. Blake, sometime contract surgeon to the Philippine Army of Occupation, he supplemented,
gpt
The Philippines--oh, you've been in the East? When we were in the Orient, I used to hear of them ever so dimly--I didn't think we'd all be talking of them so soon--
human
Oh, you've been in the Orient--do you know the China Coast--and Nikko and--
gpt
No, only India.
human
I've never been there--and I've heard it's the kernel of the East, he said with his lips. But his mind was puzzling something out and finding a solution. The accent of that deep, resonant voice was neither Eastern nor Western, Yankee nor Southern--nor yet quite British. It was rather cosmopolitan--he had dimly placed her as a Californienne. Perhaps this fragment explained it. She must be a daughter of the English official class, reared in America. The theory would explain her complexion and her simple, natural balance between frankness and reserve. He formed that conclusion, but,
gpt
How do you like America after India?
human
How do you like it after the Philippines?
gpt
That is a Yankee trick--answering one question with another, he said, still following his line of conjecture;
human
Well, then, --her manner had, for the first time, the brightness which goes with youth, plus the romantic adventure--
gpt
I like it not only after anything but before anything--I'm an American, too.