The Breaking Point | Page 4

clothes.
"Do you mind going around the block?" she asked. "By Station Street?"
There was something furtive and yet candid in her voice, and Elizabeth
glanced at her.
"All right. But it's out of your way, isn't it?"
"Yes. I--You're so funny, Elizabeth. It's hard to talk to you. But I've got
to talk to somebody. I go around by Station Street every chance I get."

"By Station Street? Why?"
"I should think you could guess why."
She saw that Clare desired to be questioned, and at the same time she
felt a great distaste for the threatened confidence. She loathed
arm-in-arm confidences, the indecency of dragging up and exposing, in
whispers, things that should have been buried deep in reticence. She
hesitated, and Clare slipped an arm through hers.
"You don't know, then, do you? Sometimes I think every one must
know. And I don't care. I've reached that point."
Her confession, naive and shameless, and yet somehow not without a
certain dignity, flowed on. She was mad about Doctor Dick
Livingstone. Goodness knew why, for he never looked at her. She
might be the dirt under his feet for all he knew. She trembled when she
met him in the street, and sometimes he looked past her and never saw
her. She didn't sleep well any more.
Elizabeth listened in great discomfort. She did not see in Clare's
hopeless passion the joy of the flagellant, or the self-dramatization of a
neurotic girl. She saw herself unwillingly forced to peer into the
sentimental windows of Clare's soul, and there to see Doctor Dick
Livingstone, an unconscious occupant. But she had a certain fugitive
sense of guilt, also. Formless as her dreams had been, vague and shy,
they had nevertheless centered about some one who should be tall, like
Dick Livingstone, and alternately grave, which was his professional
manner, and gay, which was his manner when it turned out to be only a
cold, and he could take a few minutes to be himself. Generally
speaking, they centered about some one who resembled Dick
Livingstone, but who did not, as did Doctor Livingstone, assume at
times an air of frightful maturity and pretend that in years gone by he
had dandled her on his knee.
"Sometimes I think he positively avoids me," Clare wailed. "There's the
house, Elizabeth. Do you mind stopping a moment? He must be in his
office now. The light's burning."

"I wish you wouldn't, Clare. He'd hate it if he knew."
She moved on and Clare slowly followed her. The Rossiter girl's flow
of talk had suddenly stopped. She was thoughtful and impulsively
suspicious.
"Look here, Elizabeth, I believe you care for him yourself."
"I? What is the matter with you to-night, Clare?"
"I'm just thinking. Your voice was so queer."
They walked on in silence. The flow of Clare's confidences had ceased,
and her eyes were calculating and a trifle hard.
"There's a good bit of talk about him," she jerked out finally. "I suppose
you've heard it."
"What sort of talk?"
"Oh, gossip. You'll hear it. Everybody's talking about it. It's doing him
a lot of harm."
"I don't believe it," Elizabeth flared. "This town hasn't anything else to
do, and so it talks. It makes me sick."
She did not attempt to analyze the twisted motives that made Clare
belittle what she professed to love. And she did not ask what the gossip
was. Half way up Palmer Lane she turned in at the cement path
between borders of early perennials which led to the white Wheeler
house. She was flushed and angry, hating Clare for her unsolicited
confidence and her malice, hating even Haverly, that smiling,
tree-shaded suburb which "talked."
She opened the door quietly and went in. Micky, the Irish terrier, lay
asleep at the foot of the stairs, and her father's voice, reading aloud,
came pleasantly from the living room. Suddenly her sense of
resentment died. With the closing of the front door the peace of the
house enveloped her. What did it matter if, beyond that door, there

were unrequited love and petty gossip, and even tragedy? Not that she
put all that into conscious thought; she had merely a sensation of
sanctuary and peace. Here, within these four walls, were all that one
should need, love and security and quiet happiness. Walter Wheeler,
pausing to turn a page, heard her singing as she went up the stairs. In
the moment of the turning he too had a flash of content. Twenty-five
years of married life and all well; Nina married, Jim out of college,
Elizabeth singing her way up the stairs, and here by the lamp his wife
quietly knitting while he read to her. He was reading Paradise Lost:
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make