“You live in just such a part of town yourself,” said Lydia.
“My good-for-nothing, pretentious, fashionable patients wouldn’t come to me if I didn’t.”
“Why do you have to have that kind of patients?”
Occasionally, of late, with her godfather, Lydia had displayed a certain uncompromising directness, rather out of character with her usual gentleness, which the doctor found very disconcerting. He was silent now.
Mrs. Sandworth’s greater simplicity saw no difficulties in the way of an answer. “Because, Lydia, he’s one of the Kentucky Meltons, and because, as I said, he talks a great deal worse than he is.”
“Because I am a fool,” said the doctor again. This time he flushed as he spoke.
“He doesn’t like things common around him,” went on Mrs. Sandworth, “any more than any gentleman does. And as for strangling old Mrs. Burgess, what good would that do? It can’t be she who’s influencing Endbury, because all it’s trying to do is to be just like every other town in Ohio.”
“In the Union!” amended Dr. Melton grimly. He subsided after this into one of his fidgety, grimacing, finger-nail-gnawing reveries. He was wondering whether he dared tell Lydia of a talk he had had that morning with her father. After a look at Lydia’s flushed, tired face, he decided that he would better not; but as the two women fell into a discussion of the layette, the conversation, Mr. Emery’s nervous voice, his sharp, impatient gestures, came back to him vividly. He looked graver and graver, as he did after each visit to his old friend, and after each fruitless exhortation to “go slow and rest more.” Mr. Emery was in the midst of a very important trial and, as he had very reasonably reminded his physician, this was not a good time to relax his grasp on things. “Now I’m back in practice, in competition with younger men, I can’t sag back! It’s absurd to ask it of me.”
“You were a fool to go back into practice at your age.”
“A fool! I’ve doubled my income.”