"They're nervous. With everybody walking these days they daren't venture a nose out of doors."
He was still holding the clipping.
"And—Miss Jennings!" he said. "She—I think she looks better."
"Her father's in a better humor for one thing—says Abraham Lincoln split logs, and that it beats massage."
I had been standing in the doorway, but he took me by the arm and drew me into the room.
"I wish you'd sit down for about ten minutes, Minnie," he said. "I guess every fellow has a time when he's got to tell his troubles to some good woman—not but that you know mine already. You're as shrewd as you are kind."
I sat down on the edge of a chair. For all I had had so much to do with the sanatorium, I never forgot that I was only the spring-house girl. He threw himself back in his easy chair, with the candle behind him on the table and his arms above his head.
"It's like this, Minnie," he said. "Mr. Jennings likes the new order of things and—he's going to stay."
I nodded.
"And I like it here. I want to stay. It's the one thing I've found that I think I can do. It isn't what I've dreamed of, but it's worth while. To anchor the derelicts of humanity in a sort of repair dock here, and scrape the barnacles off their dispositions, and send them out shipshape again, surely that's something. And I can do it."