The Breaking Point | Page 6

end of the service. Came down the aisle the Courtney boy,
clean and shining and carrying high his glowing symbol. Came the
choir, two by two, the women first, sopranos, altos and Elizabeth.
Came the men, bass and tenor, neatly shaved for Sunday morning.
Came the rector, Mr. Oglethorpe, a trifle wistful, because always he fell
so far below the mark he had set. Came the benediction. Came the slow
rising from its knees of the congregation and its cheerful bustle of
dispersal.
Doctor Dick Livingstone stood up and helped Doctor David into his
new spring overcoat. He was very content. It was May, and the sun was
shining. It was Sunday, and he would 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