“If you mean her father—you know he’s kept his hands off religiously.”
“He has that, damn him!” The doctor raged about the room.
A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth’s face. “You’re just as inconsistent as you can be!” she cried.
“I’m more than that,” he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the corner of the room; “I’m heartsick.” He shivered, thrust his hands into his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.
One of Mrs. Sandworth’s cheerful capacities was for continuing tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every disturbance in the region of the emotions. You had to, she said, to get them done—anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps, loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.
She answered him reasonably, “It wouldn’t help Lydia any if I took it off and threw it in the fire, would it? It’s my best one, too; the other’s at the hairdresser’s, getting curled.”
“It’s not,” the doctor broke out—“it’s not, Heaven be my judge! that I want to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself.”
“She has, at last,” Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at his forgetting so important a fact.
“She has not!” roared the doctor.
His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. “Marius, you’re unkind. What did you tell me she had for—when I’m so tired it seems as if I could lie down and die if I—”