I
Monday morning found Eileen too ill to be out of bed. Dr. Schubert came in response to an urgent request from her father, looked at her tongue, felt her pulse, smiled tolerantly ... and prescribed a nerve sedative. Later in the day the girl who had twined her baby fingers about the emotional center which in a man of science does duty as a heart asserted her right to consideration. He went home and talked it over with Sydney.
“Use your intuition, boy. I can’t have her going to pieces like this. She has always been free from hysteria—so different from her mother.”
“She has had her first love affair—and Hal Marksley is off to college.”
“Sydney! That thick-lipped youth! Besides, Eileen is only a child.”
“You remember the day she was born, and you forget the days between. I have been wretched over it all summer. One night I met them, half way over to Greenville—the night I was called to see the Hemple baby. I spoke to Sylvia about it. And she reminded me of the night—on that same road—when old Selim cast a shoe, and we didn’t get home until almost morning. Once I was on the point of taking it up with Lary; but he’s too deeply in love to see.”
“Lary in love! Who’s the charmer?”
“You dear old scientific abstraction. Have you had Mrs. Ascott at your elbow four days a week—and do you think a fellow with Lary’s temperament could spend all his evenings with her, and escape?”
“That’s—beautiful! But what about her ... a woman who has exhausted New York and Paris? Would she be satisfied with a simple nature like Lary’s?”
“Lary’s nature is about as simple in its refractions as a rose diamond! Mrs. Ascott mothers him. I have tried to make up that deficit in his life—but of course a boy he grew up with couldn’t do it, as a sensitive woman could. He knows I understand about Mrs. Ascott. Oh, not that we have ever talked about it. That would be too crude for Lary.”