“Doctor,” said the girl, “if you let your dinner get cold, after you’ve been so good to Frankie, I’ll never forgive myself!”
He couldn’t help smiling at her tremendous earnestness, yet it pleased him. He looked down at her and she looked up at him, and he was still more pleased. Hers was the sort of prettiness that he liked best of all—not the fragile, exquisite, rather alarming kind, but the simple, honest, gentle sort—the home sort.
She was little and slender, but she looked strong. She had blue eyes, and they were beautifully kind; she had black hair that curled, and a mouth that was generous and firm. What is more, Dr. Joe remembered the look she had given Frankie when he came in. He knew what she was capable of; he thought she was a wonderful girl.
“See here!” he said. “Stay and have a bite with me—you and Frankie—and I’ll take you home afterward.”
Mrs. MacAdams coughed again. Goodness knows what meaning she intended to convey, what warnings and reproaches, but certainly the effect was very different from what she had wished. That cough awoke in Dr. Joe a firm determination to ask whom he pleased, when he pleased, to his own board. It also caused the girl to make a curious remark.
“Dr. Joe,” she said, “Frankie’s nurse, that you saw this afternoon—she’s my grandmother.”
Now no one had ever heard Dr. Joe mention the word “democracy,” and he never thought about it, either. If you had questioned him, he would have told you, with considerable vigor, that he did not believe all men to be equal. He saw human beings at all the crises of their lives, and he knew[Pg 264] that they weren’t equal. He saw people who were heroic in suffering, and he admired them; he saw people who were not heroic, and he pitied them, and that was about as far as he went in judging his fellow creatures. As for dividing people according to their wealth, or their social standing, or their education, that never entered his head; so that he hadn’t the faintest notion that he was being tested, or that the girl was being plucky.
“I see!” he said cheerfully. “Now, then, Mrs. MacAdams! Can you scratch up something for these two young people to eat?”
Mrs. MacAdams did not like being asked to “scratch up” anything, and she did not like these young people.
“I shall do my best, doctor,” she promised in a rather chilly tone.