“Yes, doctor.”
“—say goodnight or good morning.”
“Certainly, I understand.”
“—with the privilege that tomorrow—or today—when I come back to see your mother—”
“Yes, doctor.”
“—of saying good afternoon.”
“That would be a pleasure.”
“Goodnight, Miss Brickster.”
“Goodnight, Dr. Hines.”
V
Bill arrived at the office in a state of irritation caused not only by loss of sleep but to indefinable objections to his situation that he lacked the alertness to analyze. One of them, though, he was sure of; it was that Doctor Hines never arrived till noon anymore and that fact threw double harness, sometimes fire-horse harness, upon his assistant. Bill saw no justification for this growing laziness of a man in his middle forties.
—Maybe I’m just sore because I’m late myself this morning. Maybe I’m trying to switch it off on him.
Thus he tried to stay within bounds of equity, but as Dr. Hines arrived at the moment when Bill was regarding a mass of twenty obligations and twenty messages he lost his temper.
“It’s hard for me to do all this detail and keep reading.” he implied fairly faintly but fairly audibly.
Dr. Hines looked at him surprised, then fell back into vacuous placidity.
“But in these times,” He spoke with the imitation heartiness that he used for patients, “—it’s good to have anything to do at all, ha-ha.” He arrested the last “ha” on what he read in Bill’s face.
“I mean it, Doctor Hines. I don’t know why you don’t get down here and I don’t care, but it’s damned unjust considering the percentage I take. I suggest you get to bed earlier at night.”
Dr. Hines’ eyes widened; his lower lip dropped.
“All right,” he said, piling up his resentment, “But have you forgotten I picked you up as a raw interne and brought you into the practise that I had built up in this city—” He paused to blow and Bill said patiently:
“I admit that,” suddenly he added an afterthought that had been passed up to him from below the night before, “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do about it and I’ll tell you quick.” Dr. Hines paused at this moment and, being no fool himself, examined his conscience and blew but with less wind, “I’m going to—”
He suddenly realized he was going to do nothing about it. After a big start he had let himself grow soft over a long period; lately he had handed over everything difficult, even his personal secrets, to Bill Hardy. With Bill no longer there the very structure of the firm collapsed. Dr. Hines simply sat and stared at the younger man.
Bill guessed the older man’s thoughts; he realized that he had gotten his point over, and granting his senior enough time to recuperate and preserve his dignity he retired; tossing the most necessary directions about the afternoon to the competent Miss Weiss as he went out the door.
He drove quickly north, and as he drove he thought, or concluded a thought he had been thinking for the last fatigued hours, that the little boy was fighting a battle with realities on his own, that there would eternally continue to be Mrs. Bricksters, that romance was for children and work and danger for men, and the best he could hope was that at day’s end something softer and different would be waiting at the turning of a lane.
It was only afternoon then, but Bill thought he saw just that across the shrill early afternoon with an entirely new opera of insect sounds and the trees’ shadows thrown a new way. He was not absolutely sure he saw it; then he was suddenly sure.
In a few minutes he said:
“I’ve got something to tell you. Unfortunately very quickly, because there seems to be a lot of stuff I’ve got to do at the minute—”
“Awll—ll right,” said the little boy sitting with them, “Awll—ll right—” And without even being told, “I can always take orders from a big shot—I’m gone.” And amazingly he was.
Bill looked after him with a faint touch of regret that he probably would never find out what the Bluga was and how it was that people looked at each other on Christmas. Then he turned to the girl.
“Look,” he began, “You are so beautiful—practically unearthly. You—”
“Yes.”
“You have everything a girl could have—” He hesitated. “In short—”
And as she knew he’d be a long time, since he had said “in short,” she decided to speed up things.
“What are you going to do about it?” she asked.
Become impatient of all the explaining that seemed to be demanded in this household Bill Hardy took matters into his own arms and began a practical demonstration.
