"Is he?"
"It's only wise," said Yates authoritatively, "that he should take charge of the case now. It's full time we had him in. He knows your constitution—and you can trust him, and feel quite safe to go on just as he advises you."
Dr. Eldridge was a long time alone with the patient. After Yates had been told to leave them, he talked gently and gravely to his old friend. He confessed to being rather sceptical by habit of mind; in forming a diagnosis he was perhaps always disposed to err on the side of caution, and thus he often declined to accept what at first sight seemed an obvious inference until it had been corroborated by indisputable evidence;—but then again, all his experience had shown him how prudent, how necessary it is to prepare oneself for disappointment.... He thought that Mrs. Marsden should, if possible, prepare herself for disappointment.
Outside the room, he spoke to Yates with a severity that was only mitigated by contempt.
"What nonsense have you been stuffing her up with? It's too bad of you." And then the professional contempt for amateur doctors sounded in the severe tone of his voice. "You ought to know better at your time of life."
He came again next day, and told Mrs. Marsden the bitter truth. The correct interpretation of the symptoms was far, very far different from that which she had imagined. And then he pronounced the words of doom. It was not the birth of hope, but the death of hope. Somewhat earlier than one would have predicted as likely, she had passed the turning-point in the cyclic history of her existence.
A deadly, numbing apathy descended upon her. She was not ill; but in order to escape the infinitely oppressive duties of dressing, sitting at meals, walking up and down stairs, listening to voices and answering questions, she pretended illness; and, to cover the pretence, Dr. Eldridge frequently visited her.
Day after day she lay upon her sofa, watching the feeble daylight turn to dusk, staring at the red glow of the coals or the golden flicker of burning wood—feeling too sad to reproach, too weak to curse the inexorable laws of destiny.
Her husband used to enter the room noisily and jovially, with a cigar in his mouth and a shining silk hat on the back of his head.