"My dear Mrs. Mitchell," he said with his professional smile, "please ask me something I can tell you. After all, you know, we doctors are not prophets. I have known the strokes to follow each other within a very short time and sometimes they are years apart. In fact, sometimes the patient never has another and dies of some quite other—complication. The only thing to do is rest, quiet and diversion."
After he had gone, Hilda said thoughtfully:
"I wonder, if I went straight down town now, whether they could get a chair here to-night."
"You might try."
"I believe I will."
Just at dusk, they brought it, a comfortable chair on wheels, with a little rack for books, a tiny adjustable side tray, and a footrest. Hilda lit both gas jets in the bedroom and Anne wheeled herself gayly in. This unusual game covered over the presentation long enough to get James settled, and then the added comfort and independence hid, for the moment, his terrible need.
No one knew that James Mitchell cried that night when the excitement was over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Hour after hour, day after day, the train raced on, away from the smoke-wrapped slums of great cities, from great stretches of the earth torn open for men's greed, from the mills where little children slaved to accumulate the wealth of those whom they would never see. On and on, over the sun-soaked earth, across black, fat land; clean and empty desert; past lonely farms; little towns, isolated from the inimical immensity about them by their fenced gardens, their paved streets and electric lights. Above the prairie flatness, the gilded domes of their courthouses boomed pompously of law and order, and the tapering spires of churches pricked the blue sky to attract the attention of God.
Long after the rest of the car was asleep, Roger sat on the observation watching the distant lights break through the thick blackness, come near, recede, disappear. Something was so desperately wrong. There was so much land, so few owners. So much wealth, so many poor. Myriads lived and died, that a few might enjoy. That a few might own the earth, millions upon millions tore it apart, herded in unclean cities, built uncanny machines to speed the process of accumulation.