Love in chief

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
A Novel
ROSE K. WEEKES
“One should master one’s passions (love, in chief), And be loyal to one’s friends.”
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS · MCMIV
Copyright, 1904, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. Published September, 1904.
LOVE IN CHIEF
LOVE IN CHIEF
The waiting-room of Dr. Maude’s surgery at Monkswell was sparely furnished with guests, mainly because the December weather was of that mild and unseasonable type commonly called unhealthy. The darkness outside was pierced by a fine, invisible rain, borne on a south wind, and the waiting-room, though heat as well as light was spread only by a single gas-burner, was not cold. One patient was with the doctor; the details of his complaint could have been overheard by the others if they had cared to listen, but they did not; sufficient unto them were their own diseases. Five centres of self-complacent misery were sitting on a cane-seated bench; the sixth person was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. The only other representative of the male sex was eight years old, and had come to have a tooth out; too stolid to feel nervous, he sat sucking peppermints. His mother, in a decent black mantilla and a square-fronted bonnet trimmed with red chrysanthemums, was talking to a girl with a baby about wrongs invisible to the unjaundiced eye. The young mother’s dark eyes and delicate features had the remains of real beauty, though two years of matrimony had made her middle-aged; her pretty young sister, sitting beside her, showed what she must have been. The baby was not handsome; its pinkish-purple face was framed in a yellow woollen hood, and the colour which should have tinged its cheeks had settled upon its ugly little button of a nose and on its chin. It wheezed; the mother coughed loosely; the girl stared before her; the young man also coughed, but inobtrusively. He did not give to phthisis its due dignity.
The surgery presently discharged its patient and received the small martyr to toothache. The young man took the seat left vacant; and the gaslight, falling on his face, showed thin, brown features, eyebrows strongly arched and strongly marked, and bright, vagrant eyes which took an interest in everything. He edged a little closer to the young mother and looked inquiring. Finding that did not answer, he plunged into conversation with a speech which was admirable in sentiment but not discreet in wording.