He laughed again. “'Tell the truth, you shame the Devil.' But the Devil replies by starving you. It's a fairly effective retort. I am not the stuff successful family physicians are made of. In the City I may manage to rub along. One doesn't see so much of one's patients; they come and go. Clerks and warehousemen my practice will be among chiefly. The poor man does not so much mind being told the truth about himself; it is a blessing to which he is accustomed.”
We spoke but once of Barbara. A photograph of her in her bride's dress stood upon my desk. Occasionally, first fitting the room for the ceremony, sweeping away all impurity even from under the mats, and dressing myself with care, I would centre it amid flowers, and kneeling, kiss her hand where it rested on the back of the top-heavy looking chair without which no photographic studio is complete.
One day he took it up, and looked at it long and hard.
“The forehead denotes intellectuality; the eyes tenderness and courage. The lower part of the face, on the other hand, suggests a good deal of animalism: the finely cut nostrils show egotism—another word for selfishness; the nose itself, vanity; the lips, sensuousness and love of luxury. I wonder what sort of woman she really is.” He laid the photograph back upon the desk.
“I did not know you were so firm a believer in Lavater,” I said.
“Only when he agrees with what I know,” he answered. “Have I not described her rightly?”
“I do not care to discuss her in that vein,” I replied, feeling the blood mounting to my cheeks.
“Too sacred a subject?” he laughed. “It is the one ingredient of manhood I lack, ideality—an unfortunate deficiency for me. I must probe, analyse, dissect, see the thing as it really is, know it for what it is.”
“Well, she is the Countess Huescar now,” I said. “For God's sake, leave her alone.”
He turned to me with the snarl of a beast. “How do you know she is the Countess Huescar? Is it a special breed of woman made on purpose? How do you know she isn't my wife—brain and heart, flesh and blood, mine? If she was, do you think I should give her up because some fool has stuck his label on her?”