She could not make herself believe that. She saw students coming and going on the street, and they all seemed so gay and well dressed.
"All this will trouble you for a little while," the Doctor said. "When I came to the University the first time I seemed like a cat in a bath tub. I thought everybody was laughing at me, but, as a matter of fact, nobody paid any attention to me at all. Then I got mad, and I said, 'Well, I'll make you pay attention to me before I'm done.'" The Doctor smiled at her and she had the courage to smile back. It was wonderful how well he understood her.
He drove her around the Lake drive. It was beautiful, but in her depression the more beautiful anything was the more it depressed her. The Doctor did not demand speech of her, well knowing she did not care to talk.
"I'm not mistaken in the girl," he said to his wife when they were alone. "She has immense reserve force—I feel it. Wait until she straightens up and broadens out a little, you'll see! There's some half-savage power in her, magnetism, impelling quality. I predict a great future for her if—"
"If what?"
"If she don't marry. She is passionate, willful as a colt. It seems impossible she has come thus far without entanglement. She's going to be very handsome when she gets a little more at ease. I thought her a wonderful creature as she sat in that school-room, with the yellow sun striking across her head. She appeared to me to have destiny in her favor."
"She's fine, but I think you're over-enthusiastic, Edward."
"Wait and see. She isn't a chatter-box like Josie, that is evident."
"In fact, my dear," he went on to say after a silence, "I should like to adopt her—I mean, of course, take a particular interest in her. She has appealed to me very strongly from the first. You can be a mother to Josie and I'll be a father to Rose."
There was something sombre under his smiling utterance of these words. Their eyes did not meet, and there was a silence. At last the Doctor said: