He was forty, handsome, dignified, with touches of gray in his
close-clipped hair, but no other sign of years in his face or his
big, well-built figure. He had clever, fine eyes behind black-
rimmed glasses, a surgeon's clever hands, a pleasant voice. He
lived with his mother in a fine old house on Washington Square, in
New York City, and worked as tirelessly as if he were a penniless
be ginner at his profession instead of a rich man, a rich woman's
heir, and already recognized as a genius in his own line.
All women liked him, and he liked them all. He sent them books,
marked essays in magazines for their individual consideration,
took them to concerts, remembered their birthdays. But his only
close friends were men, the men with whom he played tennis and
golf, or with whom he was associated in his work.
With all his cleverness and all his charm, Warren Gregory was not
a romantic figure in the eyes of most women. He had inherited from
his old Irish mother a certain mildness, and a lenience, where
they were concerned. He neither judged them nor idolized them.
They belonged only to his leisure hours. His real life was in his
club, in his books, and in the hospital world where there were
children's tiny bones to set. He was conscious, as a man born in a
different circle always is conscious, that he had, by a series of
pleasant chances, been pushed straight into the inner heart of the
social group whose doors are so resolutely closed to many men and
women, and he liked it. His grand father had had blood but no
money, his mother money but no social claim. He inherited, with
the O'Connell millions, the Gregory name, and for perhaps ten
years he had enjoyed an unchallenged popularity. He had inherited
also, without knowing it, a definitely different standard from
that held by all the men and women about him. In his simple,
unobtrusive way he held aloof from much that they said and did.
Greg, said the woman, was a regular Puritan about gossip, about
drinking, about gambling.
They never suspected the truth: that he was shy. Sure of his touch
as a surgeon, pleasantly definite about books and pictures,
spontaneous and daring in the tennis court or on the links, under
his friendly manner with women was the embarrassment of a young
boy.
Before his tenth year his rigidly conscientious mother had
instilled into the wondering little-boy mind certain mysterious
yet positive moral laws. Purity and self-control were in the air
he breathed while at her side, and although a few years later
school and college had claimed him, the effect of those early
lessons was definite upon his character. Diffidence and a sort of
fear had protected him, far more effectually than any other means
might have done, from the common vices of his age, and in those
days a certain good-natured scorn from all his associates made him
feel even more than his natural shyness, and marked him rather
apart from other young men.