“Quality and not quantity,” Miss Julia answered. “I wish you had come earlier.”
“I wish I had,” Sên King-lo replied.
“You’d have made us the even half-dozen. We were an odd number—five.”
“Why count me?” Dr. Ray asked. “I was but a looker-on in Venice.”
“Only two children—but such nice little things,” Miss Julia told Sên. “The Snows’ boy and girl. Their cousin brought them to spend the day with me. You remember her, don’t you? Miss Gilbert? She stayed the night of the garden party.”
“Oh, yes, I remember Miss Gilbert.”
“Didn’t you like her?” Miss Townsend demanded abruptly. She had caught the reserve in his tone; so had Dr. Ray and had interpreted it differently.
“Could I say so?” he asked gaily. “But I do like Miss Gilbert—very much.”
His hostess looked at him a little regretfully. She liked those she liked to like each other—and she had mistrusted his tone. But Dr. Ray threw him a shrewder glance. She, too, mistrusted his tone, and her mistrust took a different trend. Able in all her craft, diagnosis was her forte. She rarely erred in it. It was a great physician, the slender patrician that almost lounged, so assured and easy her sitting, in Miss Townsend’s great-grandfather’s favorite chair, a long history of sorrow and service carved on the face in which time and life had cut many, but only beautiful lines. Soft waves of snow covered a graceful, queenly-held head, and the long, thin hands, lying loosely on the great chair’s big arm-knobs, were as masterful as they were lovely—the polished finger-nails as rosy and mooned as a girl’s. She was a great physician, adding distinction to the profession it had cost her a hard, bitter fight—and sometimes a tortured one—to enter. But the physician armed with a genius for absolute diagnosis should not find professional greatness too far or too difficult a cry. She gave Sên King-lo a long steady look.
“You don’t know the Snows, do you?” Miss Julia asked him—more to retreat from a cul-de-sac she felt a trifle rasped than because she cared to know.