“I do know it. I do not know how I know. He hasn’t any ‘women folks’ either. He is as sensitive to every change in one’s voice as the thermometer is to changes in the atmosphere. I never saw any one like him before. When I make a collection of curiosities I find in Human Nature, I shall certainly take him for one of the rarest and most interesting. It would not take two minutes to convert him from the inquisitor to the martyr at the stake. I feel as if he were a little child crying with a thorn in his finger, and he had no mother to take it out.”
“He was only here fifteen minutes and he was as full of fun as he could be; he ran down the piazza, and he whistled while he was unhitching his horse, and began to sing as he drove off. Oh, you are so funny! you hear a man talk slang—he is equal to Sue Greyson for that—ask mother about her cough, tell a funny story, and then think his heart is breaking with a thorn in his finger.”
Tessa would not laugh. “I want him to stay; I don’t want ever to lose him.”
“Isn’t he ugly? Such a tall, square forehead. Did you ever see such a forehead?”
“My first thought of him was, ‘oh, how homely you are.’”
But that first thought never recurred; she was too much attracted by his rapid, easy utterance and sensitive voice to remember his plain face and careless attire.
She resumed her sewing with a new train of thought and had forgotten Dr. Lake’s entrance, when Bridget came to the door with a request from Mrs Wadsworth; opening the door of the sitting-room, she found her mother leaning back in her sewing chair with a plaintive and childish expression, and Dr. Lake playing with her spools of silk, sitting in a careless attitude of perfect grace at her side. Tessa was sorry to have the picture spoiled by his rising to greet her.
“Ralph Towne, M.D.,” he was replying, “he was born with a gold spoon in his pretty mouth! It would have been better for him if it had been silver-plated like mine. Quit? He’s a mummy, a cloister, a tomb! I do not quarrel with any man’s calling,” he continued, winding the black silk around his fingers, “circumstances have made me a physician. Calling! It means something only when circumstances have nothing to do with it.”
“Read the lives of the world’s best workers,” said Tessa.
“A glass of water, an empty glass, and a spoon, if you please, Miss Tessa. Do you remember—I have forgotten his name—but I assure you that I am not concocting the story—he rose to eminence in the medical profession, several rounds higher in the ladder of fame than I expect to climb—and his mind was drawn towards medicine when he was a youngster by the display of gold lace that his father’s physician flung into the eyes of the world. Gold lace made that boy a famous doctor.” Tessa brought the glasses and the water; in a leisurely manner he counted a certain number of spoonfuls of water into the empty glass. “I’m a commonplace fellow! I’m not one of the world’s workers! Neither is Ralph Towne! To have an easy life and not do much harm is the most I hope for in this world; as for the next, who knows anything about that? I say, ‘Your tongue, please,’ and drop medicine and make powders all day long for my bread and butter. I have no faith in medicine.”