The Breaking Point | Page 6

have an hour or two of leisure. And he had made a resolution about a matter that had been in his mind for some time. He was very content.
He looked around the church with what was almost a possessive eye. These people were his friends. He knew them all, and they knew him. They had, against his protest, put his name on the bronze tablet set in the wall on the roll of honor. Small as it was, this was his world.
Half smiling, he glanced about. He did not realize that behind their bows and greetings there was something new that day, something not so much unkind as questioning.
Outside in the street he tucked his aunt, Mrs. Crosby, against the spring wind, and waited at the wheel of the car while David entered with the deliberation of a man accustomed to the sagging of his old side-bar buggy under his weight. Long ago Dick had dropped the titular "uncle," and as David he now addressed him.
"You're going to play some golf this afternoon, David," he said firmly. "Mike had me out this morning to look at your buggy springs."
David chuckled. He still stuck to his old horse, and to the ancient vehicle which had been the signal of distress before so many doors for forty years. "I can trust old Nettie," he would say. "She doesn't freeze her radiator on cold nights, she doesn't skid, and if I drop asleep she'll take me home and into my own barn, which is more than any automobile would do."
"I'm going to sleep," he said comfortably. "Get Wallie Sayre--I see he's back from some place again--or ask a nice girl. Ask Elizabeth Wheeler. I don't think Lucy here expects to be the only woman in your life."
Dick stared into the windshield.
"I've been wondering about that, David," he said, "just how much right--"
"Balderdash!" David snorted. "Don't get any fool notion in your head."
Followed a short silence with Dick driving automatically and thinking. Finally he drew a long breath.
"All right," he said, "how about that golf--you need exercise. You're putting on weight, and you know it. And you smoke too much. It's either less tobacco or more walking, and you ought to know it."
David grunted, but he turned to Lucy Crosby, in the rear seat:
"Lucy, d'you know where my clubs are?"
"You loaned them to Jim Wheeler last fall. If you get three of them back you're lucky." Mrs. Crosby's voice was faintly tart. Long ago she had learned that her brother's belongings were his only by right of purchase, and were by way of being community property. When, early in her widowhood and her return to his home, she had found that her protests resulted only in a sort of clandestine giving or lending, she had exacted a promise from him. "I ask only one thing, David," she had said. "Tell me where the things go. There wasn't a blanket for the guest-room bed at the time of the Diocesan Convention."
"I'll run around to the Wheelers' and get them," Dick observed, in a carefully casual voice. "I'll see the Carter baby, too, David, and that clears the afternoon. Any message?"
Lucy glanced at him, but David moved toward the house.
"Give Elizabeth a kiss for me," he called over his shoulder, and went chuckling up the path.

II
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