What then?
The question threw him into a more desperate dilemma. He remembered his wife.
Again, his profession? He would have to abandon it for one year, perhaps for two. And Parker Steel knew that success in professional life is largely a matter of personality. Withdraw that individual power, and the whole structure, like the city of an Eastern fable, may melt abruptly into mist.
Baffled and irritated, a man with no great moral hold on the deeper truths of life, he moved aimlessly about the room, holding his right hand a little from him like one with bleeding fingers, who fears the blood may stain his clothes. The leather-padded consulting-chair stood empty before the table. Parker Steel dropped into it by the casual chance of habit, and sat staring dully at the patterning of the paper on the wall.
It was the ordeal of an egoist unlightened by a signal sense of self-abnegation or of public duty. Mercenary motives and professional ambition prompted a compromise at any hazard. The temptation to procrastinate is ever with us, and the man of the polite world is the most ingenious of sophists. For more than half an hour Parker Steel sat silent and almost motionless in his chair. When he at last left it, it was with the air of a man to whom sanity, the sanity of the self-centred ego, had returned after the hideous doubt and discord of a dream.
The wisest course was for him to temporize, seeing that it was possible that he might be mistaken.
He recognized no immediate need for trusting any one with mere suspicions.
Was he not a physician, and therefore wise as to all precautions?
As for his wife? That was a problem that might have to be considered.
The sound of the front door closing roused him to the needs of the impending present. He noticed to his surprise that it was growing dark, and that the room was full of deepening shadows.