Part 3

“You're going to play some golf this afternoon, David,” he said firmly. “Mike had me out this morning to look at your buggy springs.”

David chuckled. He still stuck to his old horse, and to the ancient vehicle which had been the signal of distress before so many doors for forty years. “I can trust old Nettie,” he would say. “She doesn't freeze her radiator on cold nights, she doesn't skid, and if I drop asleep she'll take me home and into my own barn, which is more than any automobile would do.”

“I'm going to sleep,” he said comfortably. “Get Wallie Sayre--I see he's back from some place again--or ask a nice girl. Ask Elizabeth Wheeler. I don't think Lucy here expects to be the only woman in your life.”

Dick stared into the windshield.

“I've been wondering about that, David,” he said, “just how much right--”

“Balderdash!” David snorted. “Don't get any fool notion in your head.”

Followed a short silence with Dick driving automatically and thinking. Finally he drew a long breath.

“All right,” he said, “how about that golf--you need exercise. You're putting on weight, and you know it. And you smoke too much. It's either less tobacco or more walking, and you ought to know it.”

David grunted, but he turned to Lucy Crosby, in the rear seat:

“Lucy, d'you know where my clubs are?”

“You loaned them to Jim Wheeler last fall. If you get three of them back you're lucky.” Mrs. Crosby's voice was faintly tart. Long ago she had learned that her brother's belongings were his only by right of purchase, and were by way of being community property. When, early in her widowhood and her return to his home, she had found that her protests resulted only in a sort of clandestine giving or lending, she had exacted a promise from him. “I ask only one thing, David,” she had said. “Tell me where the things go. There wasn't a blanket for the guest-room bed at the time of the Diocesan Convention.”

“I'll run around to the Wheelers' and get them,” Dick observed, in a carefully casual voice. “I'll see the Carter baby, too, David, and that clears the afternoon. Any message?”

Lucy glanced at him, but David moved toward the house.

“Give Elizabeth a kiss for me,” he called over his shoulder, and went chuckling up the path.

Mrs. Crosby stood on the pavement, gazing after the car as it moved off. She had not her brother's simplicity nor his optimism. Her married years had taken her away from the environment which had enabled him to live his busy, uncomplicated life; where, the only medical man in a growing community, he had learned to form his own sturdy decisions and then to abide by them.

Black and white, right and wrong, the proper course and the improper course--he lived in a sort of two-dimensional ethical world. But to Lucy Crosby, between black and white there was a gray no-man's land of doubt and indecision; a half-way house of compromise, and sometimes David frightened her. He was so sure.

She passed the open door into the waiting-room, where sat two or three patient and silent figures, and went back to the kitchen. Minnie, the elderly servant, sat by the table reading, amid the odor of roasting chicken; outside the door on the kitchen porch was the freezer containing the dinner ice-cream. An orderly Sunday peace was in the air, a gesture of homely comfort, order and security.

Minnie got up.

“I'll unpin your veil for you,” she offered, obligingly. “You've got time to lie down about ten minutes. Mrs. Morgan said she's got to have her ears treated.”

“I hope she doesn't sit and talk for an hour.”

“She'll talk, all right,” Minnie observed, her mouth full of pins. “She'd be talking to me yet if I'd stood there. She's got her nerve, too, that woman.”

“I don't like to hear you speak so of the patients who come to the house, Minnie.”

“Well, I don't like their asking me questions about the family either,” said Minnie, truculently. “She wanted to know who was Doctor Dick's mother. Said she had had a woman here from Wyoming, and she thought she'd known his people.”

Mrs. Crosby stood very still.

“I think she should bring her questions to the family,” she said, after a silence. “Thank you, Minnie.”

Bonnet in hand, she moved toward the stairs, climbed them and went into her room. Recently life had been growing increasingly calm and less beset with doubts. For the first time, with Dick's coming to live with them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had found a vicarious maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had been very happy. The war was over and he was safely back; again she could sew on his buttons and darn his socks, and turn down his bed at night. He filled the old house with cheer and with vitality. And, as David gave up more and more of the work, he took it on his broad shoulders, efficient, tireless, and increasingly popular.

She put her bonnet away in its box, and suddenly there rose in her frail old body a fierce and unexpected resentment against David. He had chosen a course and abided by it. He had even now no doubt or falterings. Just as in the first anxious days there had been no doubt in him as to the essential rightness of what he was doing. And now--This was what came of taking a life and moulding it in accordance with a predetermined plan. That was for God to do, not man.

She sat down near her window and rocked slowly, to calm herself. Outside the Sunday movement of the little suburban town went by: the older Wheeler girl, Nina, who had recently married Leslie Ward, in her smart little car; Harrison Miller, the cynical bachelor who lived next door, on his way to the station news stand for the New York papers; young couples taking small babies for the air in a perambulator; younger couples, their eyes on each other and on the future.