The Breaking Point | Page 7

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.
She put her bonnet away in its box, and suddenly there rose in her frail
old body a fierce and unexpected resentment against David. He had
chosen a course and abided by it. He had even now no doubt or
falterings. Just as in the first anxious days there had been no doubt in
him as to the essential rightness of what he was doing. And now--This
was what came of taking a life and moulding it in accordance with a
predetermined plan. That was for God to do, not man.
She sat down near her window and rocked slowly, to calm herself.
Outside the Sunday movement of the little suburban town went by: the
older Wheeler girl, Nina, who had recently married Leslie Ward, in her
smart little car; Harrison Miller, the cynical bachelor who lived next
door, on his way to the station news stand for the New York papers;
young couples taking small babies for the air in a perambulator;
younger couples, their eyes on each other and on the future.
That, too, she reflected bitterly! Dick was in love. She had not watched
him for that very thing for so long without being fairly sure now. She
had caught, as simple David with his celibate heart could never have
caught, the tone in Dick's voice when he mentioned the Wheelers. She
had watched him for the past few months in church on Sunday
mornings, and she knew that as she watched him, so he looked at
Elizabeth.
And David was so sure! So sure.
The office door closed and Mrs. Morgan went out, a knitted scarf
wrapping her ears against the wind, and following her exit came the
slow ascent of David as he climbed the stairs to wash for dinner.
She stopped rocking.
"David!" she called sharply.

He opened the door and came in, a bulky figure, still faintly aromatic of
drugs, cheerful and serene.
"D'you call me?" he inquired.
"Yes. Shut the door and come in. I want to talk to you." He closed the
door and went to the hearth-rug. There was a photograph of Dick on the
mantel, taken in his uniform, and he looked at it for a moment. Then he
turned. "All right, my dear. Let's have it."
"Did Mrs. Morgan have anything to say?" He stared at her.
"She usually has," he said. "I never knew you considered it worth
repeating. No. Nothing in particular."
The very fact that Mrs. Morgan had limited her inquiry to Minnie
confirmed her suspicions. But somehow, face to face with David, she
could not see his contentment turned to anxiety.
"I want to talk to you about Dick."
"Yes?"
"I think he's in love, David."
David's heavy body straightened, but his face remained serene.
"We had