"Yes, there's this new pianist, Krause. You aren't too pious, are you?"
"I'm not pious at all." A satirical memory sifted through her mind, and she heard her own voice saying, "Will you let her die without giving her time to prepare?"
"Then I'll come for you at half-past two. We'll hear the concert, and then have tea somewhere, or a stroll in the Park."
When he had gone, she put the office in order, and then waited until the last patient should leave. After all, why shouldn't she try to find some pleasure in life? Her hesitation had come, she felt, from a nervous avoidance of crowds, a shrinking from any change in her secluded manner of living. She hummed a line from one of the Gospel hymns. "Rescue the perishing, care for the dying."
"How ignorant he will think me when he discovers I have never heard any music. I am ignorant, yet I am educated compared to what I was two years ago. I know life now, and that is a great deal."
The patient came out and left, and in a few minutes Doctor Faraday passed through the room on his way to put on his overcoat.
"Are you going out before lunch?" she asked, because she knew Mrs. Faraday hated to have him miss his meals.
"Yes, I can't wait, but I'll light a cigar."
He took out one of the long slender cigars he preferred, and stopped in front of her while she struck a match and held her hand by the flame.
"That's a suitable young man, Dorinda," he remarked irrelevantly, with his whimsical smile.