“Would you mind letting me sit with you?” she asked. “I’ll not stir. I want to sew, and my room is such a mess!”
Harmony threw the door wide. “You will make me very happy, if only my practicing does not disturb you.”
Dr. Gates came in and closed the door.
“I’ll probably be the disturbing element,” she said. “I’m a noisy sewer.”
Harmony’s immaculate room and radiant person put her in good humor immediately. She borrowed a thimble —not because she cared whether she had one or not, but because she knew a thimble was a part of the game—and settled herself in a corner, her ragged pieces in her lap. For an hour she plodded along and Harmony played. Then the girl put down her bow and turned to the corner. The little doctor was jerking at a knot in her thread.
“It’s in the most damnable knot!” she said, and Harmony was suddenly aware that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.
“Please don’t pay any attention to me,” she implored. “I hate to sew. That’s the trouble. Or perhaps it’s not all the trouble. I’m a fool about music.”
“Perhaps, if you hate to sew—”
“I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had any children!”
Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was smiling up through her glasses.
“The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I’m really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food’s bad and I can’t afford to live anywhere else. I’d take a room and do my own cooking, but what time have I?” She spread out the pieces of flannel on her knee. “Does this look like anything to you?”
“A petticoat, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t intend it as a petticoat.”
“I thought, on account of the scallops—”
“Scallops!” Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.
“Scallops!” she gasped at last. “Oh, my dear, if you’d seen me cutting ‘em! And with Peter Byrne’s scissors!”
Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to Peter—Peter’s future, Peter’s poverty, Peter’s refusing to have his hair cut, Peter’s encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel Peter almost fought. It developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had the choice of weapons, and had chosen fists, and that the major had been carried away. Dr. Gates grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back on the pink flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces, united, were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the hospital. “Although,” she commented, “it looks more like a chair cover.”
Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined with a piece of her mother’s wedding dress. And as she straightened the crooked edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the mother who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart. And soon, by dint of skillful listening, which is always better than questioning, the faded little woman doctor knew all the story.
She was rather aghast.
“But suppose you cannot find anything to do?”
“I must,” simply.
“It’s such a terrible city for a girl alone.”
“I’m not really alone. I know you now.”
“An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!”
“And there is Peter Byrne.”
“Peter!” Dr. Gates sniffed. “Peter is poorer than I am, if there is any comparison in destitution!”
Harmony stiffened a trifle.
“Of course I do not mean money,” she said. “There are such things as encouragement, and—and friendliness.”
“One cannot eat encouragement,” retorted Dr. Gates sagely. “And friendliness between you and any man—bah! Even Peter is only human, my dear.”
“I am sure he is very good.”
“So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There, I’m a skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don’t fall in love with him. It will be years before he can marry. And don’t let him fall in love with you. He probably will.”
Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to prepare for lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne, regretting that a headache kept her from taking the afternoon walk as she had promised. Also, to avoid meeting him, she did without dinner, and spent the afternoon crying herself into a headache that was real enough.
Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for dinner she repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is difficult for the sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the innocence of twenty. For illusions it is apt to substitute facts, the material for the spiritual, the body against the soul. Dr. Gates, from her school of general practice, had come to view life along physiological lines.
