"Did I have any such notion as that?"
She recalled the time and place of its expression to him, and he said, "Oh
yes! Well?"
"He says that rich people like that are apt to be the hardest masters, and
are eager to forget they ever were poor, and are only anxious to identify
themselves with the rich."
Dr. Morrell seemed to enjoy this immensely. "That does rather settle it,"
he said recreantly.
She tried to be severe with him, but she only kept on laughing and joking;
she was aware that he was luring her away from her seriousness.
Mrs. Bolton brought in the lamp, and set it on the library table, showing
her gaunt outline a moment against it before she left it to throw its
softened light into the parlour where they sat. The autumn moonshine,
almost as mellow, fell in through the open windows, which let in the
shrilling of the crickets and grasshoppers, and wafts of the warm night
wind.
"Does life," Annie was asking, at the end of half an hour, "seem more
simple or more complicated as you live on? That sounds awfully abstruse,
doesn't it? And I don't know why I'm always asking you abstruse things, but
I am."
"Oh, I don't mind it," said the doctor. "Perhaps I haven't lived on long
enough to answer this particular question; I'm only thirty-six, you know."
"_Only_? I'm thirty-one, and I feel a hundred!" she broke in.
"You don't look it. But I believe I rather like abstruse questions. You
know Putney and I have discussed a great many. But just what do you mean by
this particular abstraction?"
He took from the table a large ivory paper-knife which he was in the habit
of playing with in his visits, and laid first one side and then the other
side of its smooth cool blade in the palm of his left hand, as he leaned
forward, with his elbows on his knees, and bent his smiling eyes keenly
upon her.
She stopped rocking herself, and said imperatively, "Will you please put
that back, Dr. Morrell?"
"This paper-knife?"
"Yes. And not look at me just in that way? When you get that knife and that
look, I feel a little too much as if you were diagnosing me."
"Diagnosticating," suggested the doctor.
"Is it? I always supposed it was diagnosing. But it doesn't matter. It
wasn't the name I was objecting to."
He put the knife back and changed his posture, with a smile that left
nothing of professional scrutiny in his look. "Very well, then; you shall
diagnose yourself."