She always wore large and stylish hats, and beneath them her mouth took on a look of pain at once proud, aristocratic and lonely.
She had studied medicine—but medicine in the interest of animals; she was a good horse doctor—an excellent surgeon on the major injuries to birds and dogs.
In fact she and her husband had met in a medical college in Russia—she had been the only woman in the class, the only one of the lot of them who smiled in a strange, hurt and sarcastic way when dissecting.
The men treated her like one of them, that is, they had no cringing mannerliness about their approach, they lost no poise before her, and tried no tricks as one might say.
The Silverstaffs had come to America, they had settled on the East Side, among ‘their own people’ as he would say; she never said anything when he talked like this, she sat passive, her hands in her lap, but her nostrils quivered, and somewhere under the skin of her cheek something trembled.
Her husband was the typical Jewish intellectual, a man with stiff, short, greying hair, prominent intelligent and kindly eyes, rather short, rather round, always smelling of Greek salad and carbolic acid, and always intensely interested in new medical journals, theories, discoveries.
He was a little dusty, a little careless, a little timid, but always gentle.
They had been in America scarcely eight months before the first child was born, a girl, and then following on her heels a boy, and then no more children.
Katrina Silverstaff stopped having her children as abruptly as she had begun having them; something complicated had entered her mind, and where there are definite complications of the kind that she suffered, there are no more children.
“We have eaten a great deal, my friend, against the day of God,” she had said that.