Part 33

“What about other diseases?” asked Mrs. Clyde after a pause.

“Nothing from me. The eye will report them itself quick enough. And as soon as your eye tells you that anything is the matter with it, you tell the oculist, and you’ll probably get along all right, as far as diseases go. It is not diseases that I have to worry about, as your Chinese-plan physician, so much as it is to see that you give your vision a fair chance. Let’s see. Charley, you’re the Committee on Air, aren’t you? Could you take on a little more work?”

“Try me,” said the boy promptly.

“All right; we’ll make you the Committee on Air and Light, hereafter, with power of protest and report whenever you see your mother going out in a polka-dotted, cross-eyed veil, or your grandmother reading a Bible that needs burning worse than any heretic ever did, or any of the others working or playing without sufficient illumination. Here endeth this lecture, with a final word. This is it:—

“The eye is the most nervous of all the body’s organs. Except in early childhood, when it has the recklessness and overconfidence of unbounded strength, it complains promptly and sharply of ill-usage. Now, there are a few hundred rules about when and how to use the eyes and when and how not to use them. I’m not going to burden you with those. All I’m going to advise you is that when your eyes burn, smart, itch, or feel strained, there’s some reason for it, and you should obey the warning and stop urging them to work against their protest. In fact, I might sum it all up in a motto which I think I’ll hang here in the library—a terse old English slang phrase.”

“What is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“‘Mind your eye,’” replied the Health Master.

VI. THE RE-MADE LADY

“Of all unfortunate times!” lamented Mrs. Clyde, her piquant face twisted to an expression of comic despair. “Why couldn’t he have given us a little more notice?”

Impatiently she tossed aside the telegram which announced that her husband’s old friend, Oren Taylor, the artist, would arrive at seven o’clock that evening.

“Don’t let it bother you, dear,” said Clyde. “I’ll take him to the club for dinner.”

“You can’t. Have you forgotten that I’ve invited Louise Ennis for her quarterly—well—visitation?”

Clyde whistled. “That’s rather a poser. What business have I got to have a cousin like Louise, anyway!”

Upon this disloyal observation Dr. Strong walked into the library. He was a very different Dr. Strong from the nerve-shaken wanderer who had dropped from nowhere into the Clyde household a year previous as its physician on the Chinese plan of being employed to keep the family well. The painful lines of the face were smoothed out. There was a deep light of content, the content of the man who has found his place and filled it, in the level eyes; and about the grave and controlled set of the mouth a sort of sensitive buoyancy of expression. The flesh had hardened and the spirit softened in him.

“Did you hear that, Strong?” inquired Mr. Clyde, turning to him.

“I have trained ears,” answered Dr. Strong solemnly. “They’re absolutely impervious to any speech not intended for them.”

“Open them to this: Louise Ennis is invited for dinner to-night. So is my old friend Oren Taylor, who wires to say that he’s passing through town.”

“Is that Taylor, the artist of ‘The First Parting’? I shall enjoy meeting him.”

“Well, you won’t enjoy meeting Cousin Louise,” declared Mr. Clyde. “We ask her about four times a year, out of family piety. You’ve been lucky to escape her thus far.”

“Rather a painful old party, your cousin?” inquired the physician, smilingly, of Clyde.

“Old? Twenty-two,” said Mrs. Clyde. “But she looks fifty and feels a hundred.”

“Allowing for feminine exaggeration,” amended Clyde.

“But what’s so wrong with her?” demanded the physician.

“Nerves,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Stomach,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Headaches,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Toe-aches,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Too much money,” said Mrs. Clyde.