LYING awake till morning, Delia lived over every detail of the fateful day when she had assumed the charge of Charlotte’s child. At the time she had been hardly more than a child herself, and there had been no one for her to turn to, no one to fortify her resolution, or to advise her how to put it into effect. Since then, the accumulated experiences of twenty years ought to have prepared her for emergencies, and taught her to advise others instead of seeking their guidance. But these years of experience weighed on her like chains binding her down to her narrow plot of life; independent action struck her as more dangerous, less conceivable, than when she had first ventured on it. There seemed to be so many more people to “consider” now (“consider” was the Ralston word): her children, their children, the families into which they had married. What would the Halseys say, and what the Ralstons? Had she then become a Ralston through and through?
A few hours later she sat in old Dr. Lanskell’s library, her eyes on his sooty Smyrna rug. For some years now Dr. Lanskell had no longer practised: at most, he continued to go to a few old patients, and to give consultations in “difficult” cases. But he remained a power in his former kingdom, a sort of lay Pope or medical Elder to whom the patients he had once healed of physical ills often returned for moral medicine. People were agreed that Dr. Lanskell’s judgment was sound; but what secretly drew them to him was the fact that, in the most totem-ridden of communities, he was known not to be afraid of anything.
Now, as Delia sat and watched his massive silver-headed figure moving ponderously about the room, between rows of medical books in calf bindings and the Dying Gladiators and Young Augustuses of grateful patients, she already felt the reassurance given by his mere bodily presence.
“You see, when I first took Tina I didn’t perhaps consider sufficiently—”
The Doctor halted behind his desk and brought his fist down on it with a genial thump. “Thank goodness you didn’t! There are considerers enough in this town without you, Delia Lovell.”
She looked up quickly. “Why do you call me Delia Lovell?”
“Well, because today I rather suspect you are,” he rejoined astutely; and she met this with a wistful laugh.
“Perhaps, if I hadn’t been, once before—I mean, if I’d always been a prudent deliberate Ralston it would have been kinder to Tina in the end.”
Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the armchair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. “I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”
She pondered. “Of course I realize that if I adopt Tina—”