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recovered gravity, "and I rather fancy she has been let alone too long."
Cautley thought that he had said quite enough to alarm any old lady. And indeed Mrs. Moon was slowly taking in the idea of disaster, and it sent her poor wits wandering in the past. Her voice sank suddenly from grating; antagonism to pensive garrulity.
"I've no faith in medicine," she quavered, "nor in medical men either. Though to be sure my husband had a brother-in-law once on his wife's side, Dr. Quincey, Dr. Arnold Quincey, Juliana's father and Louisa's. He was a medical man. He wrote a book, I daresay you've heard of it; Quincey on Diseases of the Heart it was. But he's dead now, of one of 'em, poor man. We haven't seen a doctor for five-and-twenty years."
"Then isn't it almost time that you should see one now?" said he, cheerfully taking his leave. "I shall look round again in the morning."
He looked round again in the morning and sat half an hour with Miss Quincey; so she had time to take a good look at him.
He was very nice to look at, this young man. He was so clean-cut and tall and muscular; he had such an intellectual forehead; his mouth was so firm, you could trust it to tell no secrets; and his eyes (they were dark and deep set) looked as if they saw nothing but Miss Quincey. Indeed, at the moment he had forgotten all about Rhoda Vivian, and did see nothing but the little figure in the bed looking more like a rather worn and wizened child than a middle-aged woman. He was very gentle and sympathetic; but for that his youth would have been terrible to her. As it was, Miss Quincey felt a little bit in awe of this clever doctor, who in spite of his cleverness looked so young, and not only so young but so formidably fastidious and refined. She had not expected him to look like that. All the clever young men she had met had displayed a noble contempt for appearances. To be sure, Miss Quincey knew but little of the world of men; for at St. Sidwell's the types were limited to three little eccentric professors, and the plaster gods in the art studio. But for the gods she might just as well have lived in a nunnery, for whenever Miss Quincey thought of a man she thought of something like Louisa's husband, Andrew Mackinnon, who spoke with a strong Scotch accent, and wore flannel shirts with celluloid collars, and coats that hung about him all anyhow. But Dr. Cautley was not in the least like Andrew Mackinnon. He had a distinguished voice; his clothes fitted him to perfection; and his linen, irreproachable itself, reproved her silently.
Her eyes left him suddenly and wandered about the room. She was full of little tremors and agitations; she wished that the towels wouldn't look so much like dish-cloths; she credited him with powers of microscopic observation, and wondered if he had noticed the stain on the carpet and the dust on the book-shelves, and if he would be likely to mistake the quinine tabloids for vulgar liver pills, or her bottle of hair-wash for hair-dye. Once released from its unnatural labours, her mind returned instinctively to the trivial as to its home. She glanced at her hat, perched conspicuously on the knob of the looking-glass, and a dim sense of its imperfections came over her and vanished as it came. Then she tried to compose herself for the verdict.
It did not come all at once. First of all he asked her a great many questions about herself and her family, whereupon she gave him a complete pathological story of the Moons and Quinceys. And all the time he looked so hard at her that it was quite embarrassing. His eyes seemed to be taking her in (no other eyes had ever performed that act of hospitality for Miss Quincey). He pulled out a little book from his pocket and made notes of everything she said; Miss Quincey's biography was written in that little book (you may be sure nobody else had ever thought of writing it). And when he had finished the biography he talked to her about her work (nobody else had ever been the least interested in Miss Quincey's work). Then Miss Quincey sat up in bed and became lyrical as she described the delirious joy of decimals--recurring decimals--and the rapture of cube-root. She herself had never got farther than cube-root; but it was enough. Beyond that, she hinted, lay the infinite. And Dr. Cautley laughed at her defence of the noble science. Oh yes, he could understand its fascination, its irresistible appeal to the emotions; he only wished to remind her that it was