“Stop, Richling. Drop those phrases and give us a healthy ‘I am,’ and ‘I must,’ and ‘I will.’ Don’t—don’t be like so many! You’re not of the many. Richling, in the first illness in which I ever attended your wife, she watched her chance and asked me privately—implored me—not to let her die, for your sake. I don’t suppose that tortures could have wrung from her, even if she realized it,—which I doubt,—the true reason. But don’t you feel it? It was because your moral nature needs her so badly. Stop—let me finish. You need Mary back here now to hold you square to your course by the tremendous power of her timid little ‘Don’t you think?’ and ‘Doesn’t it seem?’”
“Doctor,” replied Richling, with a smile of expostulation, “you touch one’s pride.”
“Certainly I do. You’re willing enough to say that you love her and long for her, but not that your moral manhood needs her. And yet isn’t it true?”
“It sha’n’t be true,” said Richling, swinging a playful fist. “‘Forewarned is forearmed;’ I’ll not allow it. I’m man enough for that.” He laughed, with a touch of pique.
“Richling,”—the Doctor laid a finger against his companion’s shoulder, preparing at the same time to leave him,—“don’t be misled. A man who doesn’t need a wife isn’t fit to have one.”
“Why, Doctor,” replied Richling, with sincere amiability, “you’re the man of all men I should have picked out to prove the contrary.”
“No, Richling, no. I wasn’t fit, and God took her.”
In accordance with Dr. Sevier’s request Richling essayed to lift the mind of the baker’s wife, in the matter of her husband’s affliction, to that plane of conviction where facts, and not feelings, should become her motive; and when he had talked until his head reeled, as though he had been blowing a fire, and she would not blaze for all his blowing—would be governed only by a stupid sentimentality; and when at length she suddenly flashed up in silly anger and accused him of interested motives; and when he had demanded instant retraction or release from her employment; and when she humbly and affectionately apologized, and was still as deep as ever in hopeless, clinging sentimentalisms, repeating the dictums of her simple and ignorant German neighbors and intimates, and calling them in to argue with him, the feeling that the Doctor’s exhortation had for the moment driven away came back with more force than ever, and he could only turn again to his ovens and account-books with a feeling of annihilation.
“Where am I? What am I?” Silence was the only answer. The separation that had once been so sharp a pain had ceased to cut, and was bearing down upon him now with that dull, grinding weight that does the damage in us.
Presently came another development: the lack of money, that did no harm while it was merely kept in the mind, settled down upon the heart.