The Breaking Point - Page 8/275

Mrs. Crosby stood on the pavement, gazing after the car as it moved off.

She had not her brother's simplicity nor his optimism. Her married years

had taken her away from the environment which had enabled him to live

his busy, uncomplicated life; where, the only medical man in a growing

community, he had learned to form his own sturdy decisions and then to

abide by them.

Black and white, right and wrong, the proper course and the improper

course--he lived in a sort of two-dimensional ethical world. But to Lucy

Crosby, between black and white there was a gray no-man's land of doubt

and indecision; a half-way house of compromise, and sometimes David

frightened her. He was so sure.

She passed the open door into the waiting-room, where sat two or three

patient and silent figures, and went back to the kitchen. Minnie, the

elderly servant, sat by the table reading, amid the odor of roasting

chicken; outside the door on the kitchen porch was the freezer

containing the dinner ice-cream. An orderly Sunday peace was in the air,

a gesture of homely comfort, order and security.

Minnie got up.

"I'll unpin your veil for you," she offered, obligingly. "You've got

time to lie down about ten minutes. Mrs. Morgan said she's got to have

her ears treated."

"I hope she doesn't sit and talk for an hour."

"She'll talk, all right," Minnie observed, her mouth full of pins.

"She'd be talking to me yet if I'd stood there. She's got her nerve,

too, that woman."

"I don't like to hear you speak so of the patients who come to the

house, Minnie."

"Well, I don't like their asking me questions about the family either,"

said Minnie, truculently. "She wanted to know who was Doctor Dick's

mother. Said she had had a woman here from Wyoming, and she thought

she'd known his people."

Mrs. Crosby stood very still.

"I think she should bring her questions to the family," she said, after

a silence. "Thank you, Minnie."

Bonnet in hand, she moved toward the stairs, climbed them and went into

her room. Recently life had been growing increasingly calm and less

beset with doubts. For the first time, with Dick's coming to live with

them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had found a vicarious

maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had been very happy. The war

was over and he was safely back; again she could sew on his buttons and

darn his socks, and turn down his bed at night. He filled the old house

with cheer and with vitality. And, as David gave up more and more of

the work, he took it on his broad shoulders, efficient, tireless, and

increasingly popular.