In delivering this quotation from Grandfather, Matthew's voice had a slightly hollow ring, as though even he were aware that the situation had unusual aspects.
Levis rose and knocked the ashes from his pipe.
"Suppose you come into the office, Matthew," said he crisply. "It will be easier to talk there."
Within doors Levis walked up and down. He did not seem to belong here in this country office, with its simple fittings, its serviceable but unmodern appliances, its outlook on farmland; he belonged in a city where he could attend fifty instead of five patients in a day.
"Matthew," said he frowning, "until this morning, it never occurred to me that it would be necessary to speak to you as I am going to speak. But I've been overreached and deceived. I don't blame you; you too have been a victim. If you're old enough to take the stand which you took this morning, to describe the convictions of your heart before strangers, you're old enough to hear what I have to say.
"You have always had smooth sailing; you can't understand what it means to be without living kin, to be bound out, to suffer intentional or unintentional slights, to have always to overcome difficulties, to deny yourself a little more when you've already next to nothing, to be cold and hungry and miserable. I wouldn't wish you to know; I want never to think of the miseries of my youth. I've done my best to shield you from all hardships; but it won't hurt you to know that such hardships exist.
"Through it all, I was determined to be a physician, and that is what I succeeded in becoming—older than most men when I graduated, but eternally grateful.
"I came into this neighborhood to begin a practice, or rather to take a practice temporarily. I didn't expect to stay beyond a year, but I married here and your mother would not leave."
For a moment Levis paused and looked out at the fields and the woodland and the empty sky. Old conflicts in which he had lost, old miseries, old thwartings came back to him, and especially, painted against the woodland, a face, exquisite in line, delicate in coloring. The face before him resembled it in outline and in expression.