"Perhaps we do sometimes!" The doctor laughed again.
"Do you ever send yours?"
"And how many do you send?"
"I don't know!" exclaimed the doctor, laughing this time without being wholly amused. "I don't know, and I never intend to try to find out."
"When I grow up we'll practise together and send twice as many," the boy said, looking into his father's eyes with the flattery of professional imitation.
"So we will! There'll be no trouble about that! Twice as many, perhaps three times! No trouble whatever!"
He took the hands from his shoulders and laid them in the palm of his and studied them—those masculine boyish hands that had never touched any of the world's suffering. And then he looked at his own hands which had handled so much of the world's suffering, but had never reached happiness; happiness which for years had dwelt just at his finger-tips but beyond arm's reach.
Not very long afterwards another conversation lettered another mile-stone in the progress of mutual understanding.
It was a beautiful drowsy May morning near noon, and the two were driving slowly homeward along the turnpike. When the lazily trotting horse reached the front gate of a certain homestead, he stopped and threw one ear backward as a living interrogation point. As his answer, he got an unexpected cut in the flank with the tip of the lash that was like the sting of a hornet: a reminder that the driver was not alone in the buggy; that the horse should have known he was not alone; and that what he did when alone was a matter of confidence between master and beast.