"I know. Best to remain discreet. Still, if we were wed——"
"It's not fitting, John. The gossip that's gone on about us, all these years, it's become a—a—what's the word I want?"
"A commonplace?"
"Yes, of course—that, with a pox. But don't you see?—if we was to wed now there'd be talk of another kind, and then—then I must be Madam Kenny and bear it like a lady, which I am not, John, and cannot be. Oh, let be as it is! I'd be most wretched, John—truly.... As you say, the boys would never speak of it. I know them too. I love them too, John."
"Well.... If it were spoken I suppose Ben would be—embarrassed, let us say, because he's much aware of social opinion. And Reuben—who looketh down upon social opinion from his own mountaintop like a puzzled angel—Reuben would hold some thought about it which I could never understand, never interpret—Kate, I don't know them!... I can't see my own youth, Kate. I think of it. A thousand things keep coming back to me now that never did so in my fifties, or sixties—my father's sniff, my Aunt Jessica's passion for setting the furniture exactly parallel to the walls and washing her hands a hundred times a day—damme, the very shape of a knot in the ash stick my father used for correcting me, and didn't I count it a great thing won if I was hit with the plain part of the stick and not with the knob! How Ru would have loathed him! I did too, but a long time after he was dead I suppose I acquired a certain comprehension, even gratitude in some matters. Well, those things come back, but only like little pictures, Kate. I can't feel how it was, to be a youth of Ben's age. I only know that once I was, and that in a world nothing like the one they live in, nothing like.... Mr. Welland stopped by at my office today."
"Mr. Welland!"
"Nay, nothing to do with illness. I now learn, Kate, that our Reuben hath suddenly decided he wishes to study medicine."
"Marry come up!"
"Ye-es. Well, I wish he might have discussed it with me first, but from what Mr. Welland told me, I believe the thought came suddenly, and I suppose Ru felt unready to speak to me about it, and Mr. Welland being in town anyway on some other errand—mph, anyway, so it is. Maybe a passing thing—but Welland seemed to think not, and was earnest, nay almost impassioned in telling me he thought the boy had a true call to it. I like Welland of course—honest man, courteous too, said he would be pleased to take Reuben as apprentice, by whatever arrangement suited my own plans for him. Man of learning too—I found we share many interests.... Damn the thing, I could have wished better for Reuben than—oh, pills, syrups, the whining of sick people, exposing himself to dangerous ills, but...."
"That's what troubled you today?"