But afterwards, back there at home where it was as if he was stripping dead years, what came over him was the feeling that things were not as they had seemed out there with Mrs. Herman. She was like that, but in being that way she was different from the whole world, at least from practically the whole of the world that he knew. Working with old things cast him back to it all. He brooded over it there in the desolate place of things left behind; the resentful feeling toward the town, together with that miserable, helpless feeling of passionate pity for Ruth settled down upon him and he could not throw it off.
He saw Deane that night; he saw him at the Club where he went to play a game of pool, because he had to get away from the house for awhile. Deane was sitting apart from the various groups, reading a magazine. Ted stood in the door of that room looking at him a minute before Deane looked up from the page. He saw that his face was thinner; it made him look older; indeed he looked a good deal older than when, just the spring before, Ted used to see him working around that place that was all shut up now. And in that moment of scrutiny he saw something more than just looking older. If you didn't know Deane you'd think—well, you'd think you didn't want to know him. And he looked as if he didn't care about your knowing him, either; he looked as if he'd thank people to let him alone. Then he glanced up and saw Ted and it seemed there were a few people he didn't want to have let him alone.
But though he brightened on seeing him, looked like himself as he came quickly up to shake hands, he was not like himself in the talk that followed. It was as if he wanted to be, tried to be, but he was constrained in asking about the West, "the folks." He seemed to want to hear, yet he wasn't like himself, though Ted could scarcely have defined the difference. He was short in what he said, cut things off sharply, and in little pauses his face would quickly settle to that moroseness. Ted told of his own plans and Deane was enthusiastic about that. Then he fell silent a moment and after that said with intensity: "I wish I was going to pull out from here!"
"Well, why don't you?" laughed Ted, a little diffidently.
"Haven't got the gumption, I guess," said Deane more lightly, and as he smiled gave Ted the impression of trying to pull himself out from something.
Later in the evening a couple of men were talking of someone who was ill. "They have Franklin, don't they?" was asked, and the answer came, "Not any more. They've switched."
Walking home, he thought it had been said as if there was more to it, as if there had been previous talk about other people who had "switched." Why, surely it couldn't be that because—for some reason or other—his wife had left him people were taking it out on his practice? That seemed not only too unfair but too preposterous. Deane was the best doctor in town. What had his private affairs—no matter what the state of them—got to do with him as a physician? Surely even that town couldn't be as two-by-four as that!
But it troubled him so persistently that next morning, when they were alone together in the attic, he brought himself to broach it to Harriett, asking, in the manner of one interested in a thing because of its very absurdity, just what the talk was about Ruth and the Franklins.
Harriett went on to give the town's gossip of how Deane had gone to Indianapolis to see his wife, to try and make it right, but her people were strongly of the feeling that she had been badly treated and it had ended with her going away somewhere with her mother. Harriett sighed heavily as she said she feared it was one of those things that would not be made right.
"I call it the limit!" cried Ted. "The woman must be a fool!"