CHAPTER III
"Why, Goosie; I tell you the lumps are growing. They're great big now, Goosie. Oh, why don't you let me take you to the doctor! I know something is the matter!"
Dolly had tears in her eyes almost, and her voice was very dolorous. For the fourteenth time in two weeks, she was treating the singular shoulders of Charles-Norton. He was sitting beneath the glow of the evening lamp, his coat off, his shirt pulled down to his elbows; and she, standing behind the chair, was leaning solicitously over him. A wisp of her hair caressed his right ear, but somehow did not relax his temper. "Well, let them alone, Dolly," he growled; "let them alone. Good Lord, let them alone!"
For two weeks he had been getting more and more peevish. To be sure, for two weeks, daily, his shoulders had been washed and rubbed and massaged and lotioned and parboiled and anointed and fomented and capsicon-plastered, till his very soul was sensitive and a suspicion was agrowl within him—a bad, mean feeling that Dolly was finding a bit, just a bit, of something akin to pleasure in the ardor of her ministrations. Besides, he was fighting a moral fight of his own. Great bursts of dissatisfaction swept through him every day now; and it was only by a constant vigilance that he kept his vagrant elbows close to his ribs.
"Let them be for a while, Dolly," he repeated in gentler tone. "Besides—besides——"