Sulkily, “Oh, come in!”
The door opened on Joyce Lanyon, cool, trim, sure.
“What do you want?” he grunted.
She stared at him; she shut the door; silently she straightened the litter of food, papers, and instruments on his table. She coaxed the indignant kitten to a mat, patted the pillow, and sat by him on the frowsy cot. Then:
“Please! I know what’s happened. Cecil is in town for an hour and I wanted to bring— Won’t it comfort you a little if you know how fond we are of you? Won’t you let me offer you friendship?”
“I don’t want anybody’s friendship. I haven’t any friends!”
He sat dumb, her hand on his, but when she was gone he felt a shiver of new courage.
He could not get himself to give up his reliance on whisky, and he could see no way of discontinuing the phage-injection of all who came begging for it, but he turned both injection and manufacture over to others, and went back to the most rigid observation of his experiment in St. Swithin’s ... blotted as it now was by the unphaged portion of the parish going in to Blackwater to receive the phage.
He did not see Joyce. He lived at the almshouse, but most evenings now he was sober.