“Do you think Doctor Moran VERY clever?”
“Most people think so.”
“He is so unsympathetic. Doctor Moore knows everything Madame Jacobus is going to have, and to do. I think doctors ought to be chatty. It is so good for their patients to be cheered up a little.”
Doctor Moran divined perfectly this taste for gossip and MEDICINAL sympathy combined, and to administer it was, to him, more nauseous than his own bitterest drugs. So in these days he was not a cheerful man to live with, and Cornelia’s beauty and radiant happiness affected him very much as Hyde’s pronounced satisfaction affected Arenta. One morning, as he was returning home after a round of disagreeable visits, he saw Cornelia and Hyde coming up Broadway together. They were sauntering side by side in all the lazy happiness of perfect love; and as he looked at them the sorrow of an immense disillusion filled him to the lips. He had believed himself, as yet, to be the first and the dearest in his child’s love; but in that moment his eyes were opened, and he felt as if he had been suddenly thrust out from it and the door closed upon him.
He did the wisest thing possible: he went home to his wife. She heard him ride with clattering haste into the stone court, and soon after enter the house from the back, banging every door after him. She knew then that something had angered him—that he was in that temper which makes a woman cry, but which a man can only relieve by noisy or emphatic movement of some kind. A resolute look came into her face and she said to herself, “John has always had his own way—and my way also; but Cornelia’s way—the child must surely have something to say about that.”
“Where is Cornelia, Ava?” He asked the question with a quick glance round the room, as if he expected to find her present.
“Cornelia is not at home to-day.”
“Is she ever at home now?”
“You know that Arenta’s wedding—”
“Arenta’s wedding! I am tired to death of it: I have heard nothing this morning but Arenta’s wedding. Why the deuce! should my house be turned upside down and inside out for Arenta’s wedding? Women have been married before Arenta Van Ariens, and women will be married after her. What is all this fuss about?”