She looked at K. defiantly, but there was no disapproval in his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Well, this is the question. She’s getting better. She’ll be able to go out soon. Don’t you think something ought to be done to keep her from—going back?”
There was a shadow in K.‘s eyes now. She was so young to face all this; and yet, since face it she must, how much better to have her do it squarely.
“Does she want to change her mode of life?”
“I don’t know, of course. There are some things one doesn’t discuss. She cares a great deal for some man. The other day I propped her up in bed and gave her a newspaper, and after a while I found the paper on the floor, and she was crying. The other patients avoid her, and it was some time before I noticed it. The next day she told me that the man was going to marry some one else. ‘He wouldn’t marry me, of course,’ she said; ‘but he might have told me.’”
Le Moyne did his best, that afternoon in the little parlor, to provide Sidney with a philosophy to carry her through her training. He told her that certain responsibilities were hers, but that she could not reform the world. Broad charity, tenderness, and healing were her province.
“Help them all you can,” he finished, feeling inadequate and hopelessly didactic. “Cure them; send them out with a smile; and—leave the rest to the Almighty.”
Sidney was resigned, but not content. Newly facing the evil of the world, she was a rampant reformer at once. Only the arrival of Christine and her fiance saved his philosophy from complete rout. He had time for a question between the ring of the bell and Katie’s deliberate progress from the kitchen to the front door.
“How about the surgeon, young Wilson? Do you ever see him?” His tone was carefully casual.
“Almost every day. He stops at the door of the ward and speaks to me. It makes me quite distinguished, for a probationer. Usually, you know, the staff never even see the probationers.”
“And—the glamour persists?” He smiled down at her.
“I think he is very wonderful,” said Sidney valiantly.
Christine Lorenz, while not large, seemed to fill the little room. Her voice, which was frequent and penetrating, her smile, which was wide and showed very white teeth that were a trifle large for beauty, her all-embracing good nature, dominated the entire lower floor. K., who had met her before, retired into silence and a corner. Young Howe smoked a cigarette in the hall.
“You poor thing!” said Christine, and put her cheek against Sidney’s. “Why, you’re positively thin! Palmer gives you a month to tire of it all; but I said—”
“I take that back,” Palmer spoke indolently from the corridor. “There is the look of willing martyrdom in her face. Where is Reginald? I’ve brought some nuts for him.”
“Reginald is back in the woods again.”
“Now, look here,” he said solemnly. “When we arranged about these rooms, there were certain properties that went with them—the lady next door who plays Paderewski’s ‘Minuet’ six hours a day, and K. here, and Reginald. If you must take something to the woods, why not the minuet person?”
Howe was a good-looking man, thin, smooth-shaven, aggressively well dressed. This Sunday afternoon, in a cutaway coat and high hat, with an English malacca stick, he was just a little out of the picture. The Street said that he was “wild,” and that to get into the Country Club set Christine was losing more than she was gaining.
Christine had stepped out on the balcony, and was speaking to K. just inside.
“It’s rather a queer way to live, of course,” she said. “But Palmer is a pauper, practically. We are going to take our meals at home for a while. You see, certain things that we want we can’t have if we take a house—a car, for instance. We’ll need one for running out to the Country Club to dinner. Of course, unless father gives me one for a wedding present, it will be a cheap one. And we’re getting the Rosenfeld boy to drive it. He’s crazy about machinery, and he’ll come for practically nothing.”
K. had never known a married couple to take two rooms and go to the bride’s mother’s for meals in order to keep a car. He looked faintly dazed. Also, certain sophistries of his former world about a cheap chauffeur being costly in the end rose in his mind and were carefully suppressed.
“You’ll find a car a great comfort, I’m sure,” he said politely.
Christine considered K. rather distinguished. She liked his graying hair and steady eyes, and insisted on considering his shabbiness a pose. She was conscious that she made a pretty picture in the French window, and preened herself like a bright bird.
“You’ll come out with us now and then, I hope.”
“Thank you.”
“Isn’t it odd to think that we are going to be practically one family!”
“Odd, but very pleasant.”
He caught the flash of Christine’s smile, and smiled back. Christine was glad she had decided to take the rooms, glad that K. lived there. This thing of marriage being the end of all things was absurd. A married woman should have men friends; they kept her up. She would take him to the Country Club. The women would be mad to know him. How clean-cut his profile was!
Across the Street, the Rosenfeld boy had stopped by Dr. Wilson’s car, and was eyeing it with the cool, appraising glance of the street boy whose sole knowledge of machinery has been acquired from the clothes-washer at home. Joe Drummond, eyes carefully ahead, went up the Street. Tillie, at Mrs. McKee’s, stood in the doorway and fanned herself with her apron. Max Wilson came out of the house and got into his car. For a minute, perhaps, all the actors, save Carlotta and Dr. Ed, were on the stage. It was that bete noir of the playwright, an ensemble; K. Le Moyne and Sidney, Palmer Howe, Christine, Tillie, the younger Wilson, Joe, even young Rosenfeld, all within speaking distance, almost touching distance, gathered within and about the little house on a side street which K. at first grimly and now tenderly called “home.”
