"Ah? Was he——"
"Just the same. He didn't know me—never does. Perhaps it's just as well. The attendant spoke as if he thought Sam was in very good shape—physically, you know. 'He'll probably live for years, Mr. Peters,' he said to me. 'He's stronger than you are this minute.' They treat him all right, I think. It's always on my mind a little, you know, that maybe they wouldn't if it wasn't for my having an eye on them all the time. I go out about once a month, but they never know when I'm coming. But you can't tell what happens in those places—even the best of them."
"Sheckard is a reliable man; I've known him for thirty years. He's always very careful about the attendants, as far as I've noticed; even the patients that haven't any money, the ones he takes for a merely nominal sum, or whatever their people can scrape up, are just as well cared-for, I think. And of course that isn't the case with Sam——"
"It takes all Sam has," interrupted Gwynne gloomily. "Every cent."
"You can't blame them. But I wouldn't worry about him, if I were in your——"
"I'm not worrying. I'm simply trying to do the best I can," said Gwynne sharply.
The doctor caught the note of uneasy irritation in his voice with surprise. Nothing could have been farther from his mind, or indeed, more unjust, than to accuse Gwynne of shirking his duties, yet the young man was plainly nettled—on the defensive. "I must have been too sympathetic," thought the doctor, remembering the miserably touchy Gwynne pride. Doctor Vardaman was the one person on earth, hardly excepting his own family, to whom Gwynne would have mentioned his brother. For everybody else, Sam Peters was away in California, in Algiers, in Timbuctoo—the devices by which Sam was kept in the background would have afforded material for a pitiful farce, if they had not been concerned with so pitiful a tragedy; there was about these lies a kind of wretched courage that went near to rendering their folly dignified. Gwynne knew that his brother's misfortune was in no sense a disgrace; but he could not bring himself to regard it as a thing to be thought or spoken of like any other illness. Too much of his life had been passed in the grimly fantastic environment of Gwynne family traditions for him to be completely emancipated at twenty-four.
"I want to do the right thing as much as anybody," said Gwynne; he scowled into the fire, chewing the end of his cigar. "Only it's not always easy to say what is the right thing. In real life right and wrong aren't laid down in black and white the way they are in those Tommy-and-Harry books we used to have when we were children; they sort of shade off into each other. You've got to—to make compromises. You can't take any satisfaction in being right—abstractly right—when you're being hard and—and cruel."
"What on earth is the boy arguing with himself about?" thought Doctor Vardaman; these not very original remarks had, for all their emphasis, the air of being offered in advocacy of some doubtful cause; there was a trace of temper and self-consciousness in them, and even the speaker himself appeared unconvinced. "He's been having trouble with Steven, I suspect," the doctor concluded, remembering how capable Steven was of making trouble, and how difficult it was to manage him without recourse to a tyranny from which Gwynne would recoil.