“No, I’m afraid not,” his wife interrupted, unhesitatingly destroying this obscure germ of hope. “When you give a child a toy it’ll play with it more at first than it will later. That doesn’t mean the child won’t cry if you try to take the toy away, does it?”
“No, I suppose not.” He had relapsed into gloom again. “And I suppose my poor little alleviation was——”
“Your ‘alleviation,’ ” Mrs. Dodge informed him, “was in the diminished number of the acute attacks—three instead of five—and not because you began to feel any affection for the disease itself.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “And I’m afraid you’ve found the correct definition for what afflicts us.” He sank into a chair, unhappily limp and relaxed, his arms hanging flaccidly over the arms of the chair. “Crabbe Osborne is our disease,” he said. “It’s a disease the more awful because when a child gets it the parents get it, too, and when they give the child an opiate they only stop her pain for a little while; and then the child and the parents, all three of ’em, have got to have the disease for the rest of their lives! And the greatest mystery of it all is that an absolutely chance boy, with no malice, no harm in him—a mere drifting bit of flesh and nothing, that we’d never heard of a year ago—that a meaningless thing like Crabbe Osborne should do all this to us!”
“It isn’t,” she said. “He has nothing whatever to do with it. It’s Lily’s imagination. Her imagination was in the state to get the disease, and it just happened this boy was the nearest thing at a crucial moment. It might as well have happened to be someone else.”
“If it had only been any one else!” Mr. Dodge exclaimed. “I’m willing to agree with you, though: Crabbe just happened to be the fatal microbe. Well, he’s done for us, that’s sure!”
Mrs. Dodge glanced sidelong at him—she was making intermittent efforts to read, and a table and a lamp were between them. “ ‘Done for us?’ Well, you said there was no alternative, didn’t you? It’s your policy, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” he groaned. “I suppose so, Lydia.” Then, shaking his head ruefully, and with a grunt of desolate laughter in his throat, he said: “I know, of course, that you’re going to lash me with it—my ‘policy’—for the rest of our lives!”
But this was a prediction unfulfilled, for they had missed a clew that was in their hands; or, more accurately, it had been in their mouths, and they had actually spoken it. A toy withheld becomes the universe to a child, and a lover withheld is life and death; but toys and lovers freely given are another matter. What Mr. and Mrs. Dodge failed to see was the significant relation of five to three.
. . . The gloomy parents, despondently communing, were still in the library at midnight when Lily came home. They heard her laughter outside before the latchkey turned in the lock of the front door; and then, with the opening of the door, her voice sounded in a gay chattering like a run of staccato notes in an aria of spring. Accompanying it, interrupting it, there was heard a ’cello obbligato, a masculine voice, young and lively, and this short duet closed with Lily’s “See you day-after-to-morrow!”