“Any one coming in might think this a sort of forum where orations were being delivered,” and sometimes she would go on and declaim:
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears—my husband has borrowed mine.”
So the telephone in the doctor's house—so great a necessity that we cannot conceive of life without it, so great a blessing that we are hourly grateful for it, is yet a very great tyrant whose dominion is absolute.
I had a pleasing picture in my mind in the writing of this chronicle, of sitting serene and undisturbed in a cosy den upstairs, with all the doors between me and the 'phone shut tight where no sound might intrude. In vain. Without climbing to the attic I could not get so far away that the tintinnabulation that so mercilessly wells from those bells, bells, bells did not penetrate.
I hope my readers have not got so far away from their Poe as to imagine that ringing sentence to be mine. And I wonder if a still greater glory might not crown his brow if there had been telephone bells to celebrate in Poe's day.
So I gave up the pleasant dream, abandoned the cosy den and came down stairs to the dining room where I can scatter my manuscript about on the big table, and look the tyrants in the face and answer the queries that arise, and can sandwich in a good many little odd jobs besides.
Through a doctor's telephone how many glimpses of human nature and how many peeps into the great Story of Life have been mine; and if, while the reader is peeping too, the scene suddenly closes, why that is the way of telephones and not the fault of the writer.
And knowing how restful a thing it has been to me to get away from the ringing of the bell at times, I have devised a rest for the reader also and have sent him with the doctor and his wife on an occasional country drive where no telephone intrudes.
E. M. F.
Robinson, Ill.