The touch of his hand upon her head was gentle.
"Patience, Selina, patience. Do not think we've not been, all of us, where you are to-day. And don't forget that it is as inevitable you also will be where we are!"
She lifted her head, staring at him in a kind of horror. She even remembered to be sorry for that long procession of youth coming to him through forty years, her heart seeming to be monotoning in a sort of bitter chanting for them, "Bread and he gave them a stone. Bread and he gave them a stone."
"Never," she declared to him passionately, getting up and feeling about for her hat that had tumbled somewhere. "Never! Please, Dr. Ronald, I'd rather go now. And as to my coming to the place that you say I some day will, never, never!"
He looked at her as she pinned on her hat, but made no motion to stay her. And the while though he said not one word, it was to her as though he shouted it forth, "So they all said, that procession of youth passing through this room through forty years."
It infuriated her so to know he was thinking it, she hurried away with barely a civil word at leaving. Like the rest of them in this also, he could have told her.
Her way back took her past the home of Algy Biggs. He was getting home from work just as she got there. The Biggs house, broad and comely, stood in half a square of irreproachable lawn, rolled and clipped, trimmed and impeccable. At the curb the carriage was just arrived with Algy's mother and his sisters in it.
When Algy had been told to go to college or get out and find a job for himself and depend on it, he found one at the locomotive shops, working on the inside of boilers. That was two years ago; he was still in the shops, getting thirty-five dollars a week now, for he said so.
And at this particular moment when Selina met him he probably was just out of his overalls, for the grime and smudge of the shops were still upon him. Tall and blond chap that he was, his blue eyes gleamed unspeakably funny out of his blackened face.