My heart gave a furious leap; my lips closed tight. “I could tell you the names of some of the stars now,” I said, in a last wrestle with conscience.
“No, no,” said Fanny Bowater, “it isn’t the stars I’m after. The first fine night we’ll go to the woods. You shall wait for me till everything is quiet. It will be good practise in practical astronomy.” She watched my face, and began silently laughing as if she were reading my thoughts. “That’s a bargain, then. What is life, Miss M., but experience? And what is experience, but knowing thyself? And what’s knowing thyself but the very apex of wisdom? Anyhow it’s a good deal more interesting than the Prince of Denmark.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “And there’s still all but a full moon.”
“Aha!” said she. “But what a world with only one! Jupiter has scores, hasn’t he? Just think of his Love Lanes!” She rose to her feet with a sigh of boredom, and smoothed out her skirts with her long, narrow hands. I stared at her beauty in amazement.
“I hate these parties here,” she said. “They are not worth while.”
“You look lov—you look all right.”
“H’m; but what’s that when there’s no one to see.”
“But you see yourself. You live in it.”
The reflected face in the glass, which, craning forward, I could just distinguish, knitted its placid brows. “Why, if that were enough, we should all be hermits. I rather think, you know, that God made man almost solely in the hope of his two-legged appreciation. But perhaps you disapprove of incense?”
“Why should I, Miss Bowater? My Aunt Kitilda was a Catholic: and so was my mother’s family right back.”
“That’s right,” said Miss Bowater. She kissed her hand to looking-glass and four-poster, flung me a last fervid smile, and was gone. And the little box I had given her lay on the table, beside my bed.
I was aroused much later by the sound of voices drawing nearer. Instinctively I sat up, my senses fastened on the sound like a vampire. The voices seemed to be in argument, then the footsteps ceased and clear on the night air came the words:—
“But you made me promise not to write. Oh, Fanny, and you have broken your own!”
“Then you must confess,” was the cautious reply, “that I am consistent. As for the promises, you are quite, quite welcome to the pieces.”
“You mean that?” was the muffled retort.
“That,” cried the other softly, “depends entirely on what you mean by ‘mean.’ Please look happy! You’d soon grow old and uglier if there was only that scrap of moon to light your face.”
“Oh, Fanny. Will you never be serious?”—the misery in the words seemed to creep about in my own mind for shelter. They were answered by a sparkling gush of laughter, followed by a crisp, emphatic knock at the door. Fanny had returned from her party, and the eavesdropper buried her face in her pillow. So she enjoyed hurting people. And yet. …
XII
The next afternoon Mrs. Bowater was out when Dr. Phelps made his call. It was Fanny who ushered him into the room. He felt my pulse again, held up the phial of medicine to the light, left unconsulted my tongue, and pronounced that “we are doing very nicely.” As indeed I was. While this professional inquiry was in progress Fanny stood silently watching us, then exclaimed that it was half-past four, and that I must have my tea. She was standing behind Dr. Phelps, and for a few seconds I watched with extreme interest but slow understanding a series of mute little movements of brows and lips which she was directing at me while he was jotting down a note in a leather pocketbook. At length I found myself repeating—as if at her dictation—a polite little invitation to him to take tea with me. The startled blue eyes lifted themselves above the pocketbook, the square, fair head was bowing a polite refusal, when, “But, of course, Dr. Phelps,” Fanny broke in like one inspired, “how very thoughtless of me!”
“Thank you, thank you, Miss Bowater, but—” cried Dr. Phelps, with a smooth uplifted hand, and almost statuesque in his pose. His refusal was too late. Miss Bowater had hastened from the room.
His panic passed. He reseated himself, and remarking that it was a very cold afternoon, predicted that if the frost continued, skating might be expected. Conversation of this kind is apt so soon to faint away like a breeze in hot weather, that I kept wondering what to say next. Besides, whenever Dr. Phelps seemed impelled to look at me, he far more quickly looked away, and the sound of his voice suggested that he was uncertain if he was not all but talking to himself. To put him more at his ease I inquired boldly if he had many other midgets among his patients.
The long lashes swept his cheeks; he pondered a while on my landlady’s window curtains. “As a matter of fact perhaps not,” he replied at last, as if giving me the result of a mathematical calculation.
“I suppose, Dr. Phelps,” I then inquired, “there might be more, at any time, might there not?” Our glances this time met. He blinked.
“My father and mother, I mean,” I explained in some confusion, “were just of the com—of the ordinary size. And what I was wondering is, whether you yourself would be sorry—in quite a general way, of course—if you found your practice going down like that.”
“Going down?”
“I mean the patients coming smaller. I never had the opportunity of asking our own doctor, Dr. Grose. At Lyndsey, you know. Besides, I was a child then. Now, first of all, it is true, isn’t it, that giants are usually rather dull-witted people? So nobody would deliberately choose that kind of change. If, then, quality does vary with quantity, mightn’t there be an improvement in the
