“I have scarcely been out of my room since spring, until recently,” replied Jessie. “Thank you, my dear” (to the little girl); “but Dr. Sanford has done wonders for me. How is your health now, Mrs. Fellows?”
“I have not been so well an entire summer in ten years. My daughter, Mrs. Tarbox, was saying the other day that she wished she had my strength. You know she is quite delicate,” said Mary.
“Speaking of Dr. Sanford,” said Henry, looking at Jessie, “he is really a remarkable man. My son has such confidence in him that he seemed quite relieved when I had passed my grand climacteric and could get on his list. You know he takes no one under sixty-three. By the way, governor,” he added, turning around with some ado, so as to face George, “I heard he had been treating your rheumatism lately. Has he seemed to reach the difficulty?”
“Remarkably,” replied George, tenderly stroking his right knee in an absent manner. “Why, don't you think I walked half the way home from my office the other day when my carriage was late?”
“I wonder you dared venture it,” said Jessie, with a shocked air. “What if you had met with some accident!”
“That's what my son said,” answered George. “He made me promise never to try such a thing again; but I like to show them occasionally that I'm good for something yet.”
He said this with a “he, he,” of senile complacency, ending in an asthmatic cough, which caused some commotion in the company. Frank got up and slapped him on the back, and Mary sent Annie for a glass of water.
George being relieved, and quiet once more restored, Henry said to Frank:—
“By the way, doctor, I want to congratulate you on your son's last book. You must have helped him to the material for so truthful a picture of American manners in the days when we were young. I fear we have not improved much since then. There was a simplicity, a naturalness in society fifty years ago, that one looks in vain for now. There was, it seems to me, much less regard paid to money, and less of morbid social ambition. Don't you think so, Mrs. Tyrrell?”
“It's just what I was saying only the other day,” replied Nellie. “I'm sure I don't know what we 're coming to nowadays. Girls had some modesty when I was young,” and she shook her head with its rows of white curls with an air of mingled reprobation and despair.