“What I meant,” she said with dignity, “is that unless one counts very young men, and that isn’t really love.”
“We’ll leave out Joe Drummond and myself—for, of course, I am very young. Who is in love with you besides Le Moyne? Any of the internes at the hospital?”
“Me! Le Moyne is not in love with me.”
There was such sincerity in her voice that Wilson was relieved.
K., older than himself and more grave, had always had an odd attraction for women. He had been frankly bored by them, but the fact had remained. And Max more than suspected that now, at last, he had been caught.
“Don’t you really mean that you are in love with Le Moyne?”
“Please don’t be absurd. I am not in love with anybody; I haven’t time to be in love. I have my profession now.”
“Bah! A woman’s real profession is love.”
Sidney differed from this hotly. So warm did the argument become that they passed without seeing a middle- aged gentleman, short and rather heavy set, struggling through a snowdrift on foot, and carrying in his hand a dilapidated leather bag.
Dr. Ed hailed them. But the cutter slipped by and left him knee-deep, looking ruefully after them.
“The young scamp!” he said. “So that’s where Peggy is!”
Nevertheless, there was no anger in Dr. Ed’s mind, only a vague and inarticulate regret. These things that came so easily to Max, the affection of women, gay little irresponsibilities like the stealing of Peggy and the sleigh, had never been his. If there was any faint resentment, it was at himself. He had raised the boy wrong—he had taught him to be selfish. Holding the bag high out of the drifts, he made his slow progress up the Street.
At something after two o’clock that night, K. put down his pipe and listened. He had not been able to sleep since midnight. In his dressing-gown he had sat by the small fire, thinking. The content of his first few months on the Street was rapidly giving way to unrest. He who had meant to cut himself off from life found himself again in close touch with it; his eddy was deep with it.
For the first time, he had begun to question the wisdom of what he had done. Had it been cowardice, after all? It had taken courage, God knew, to give up everything and come away. In a way, it would have taken more courage to have stayed. Had he been right or wrong?
And there was a new element. He had thought, at first, that he could fight down this love for Sidney. But it was increasingly hard. The innocent touch of her hand on his arm, the moment when he had held her in his arms after her mother’s death, the thousand small contacts of her returns to the little house—all these set his blood on fire. And it was fighting blood.
Under his quiet exterior K. fought many conflicts those winter days—over his desk and ledger at the office, in his room alone, with Harriet planning fresh triumphs beyond the partition, even by Christine’s fire, with Christine just across, sitting in silence and watching his grave profile and steady eyes.
He had a little picture of Sidney—a snap-shot that he had taken himself. It showed Sidney minus a hand, which had been out of range when the camera had been snapped, and standing on a steep declivity which would have been quite a level had he held the camera straight. Nevertheless it was Sidney, her hair blowing about her, eyes looking out, tender lips smiling. When she was not at home, it sat on K.‘s dresser, propped against his collar-box. When she was in the house, it lay under the pincushion.
Two o’clock in the morning, then, and K. in his dressing-gown, with the picture propped, not against the collar-box, but against his lamp, where he could see it.
He sat forward in his chair, his hands folded around his knee, and looked at it. He was trying to picture the Sidney of the photograph in his old life—trying to find a place for her. But it was difficult. There had been few women in his old life. His mother had died many years before. There had been women who had cared for him, but he put them impatiently out of his mind.
Then the bell rang.
Christine was moving about below. He could hear her quick steps. Almost before he had heaved his long legs out of the chair, she was tapping at his door outside.
“It’s Mrs. Rosenfeld. She says she wants to see you.”
He went down the stairs. Mrs. Rosenfeld was standing in the lower hall, a shawl about her shoulders. Her face was white and drawn above it.
“I’ve had word to go to the hospital,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d go with me. It seems as if I can’t stand it alone. Oh, Johnny, Johnny!”
“Where’s Palmer?” K. demanded of Christine.
“He’s not in yet.”
“Are you afraid to stay in the house alone?”
“No; please go.”
He ran up the staircase to his room and flung on some clothing. In the lower hall, Mrs. Rosenfeld’s sobs had become low moans; Christine stood helplessly over her.
“I am terribly sorry,” she said—“terribly sorry! When I think whose fault all this is!”
Mrs. Rosenfeld put out a work-hardened hand and caught Christine’s fingers.
“Never mind that,” she said. “You didn’t do it. I guess you and I understand each other. Only pray God you never have a child.”
K. never forgot the scene in the small emergency ward to which Johnny had been taken. Under the white lights his boyish figure looked strangely long. There was a group around the bed—Max Wilson, two or three internes, the night nurse on duty, and the Head.
