Dr. Breen's Practice. William Dean Howells
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have had a great deal more experience of life than I have.” Mrs. Maynard sighed deeply in assent. “But it does n't seem to have taught you that if you will provoke people to talk of you, you must expect criticism. One after another you've told nearly every woman in the house your affairs, and they have all sympathized with you and pitied you. I shall have to be plain, and tell you that I can't have them sneering and laughing at any one who is my guest. I can't let you defy public opinion here.”
“Why, Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard, buoyed above offence at her friend's words by her consciousness of the point she was about to make, “you defy public opinion yourself a good deal more than I do, every minute.”
“I? How do I defy it?” demanded Grace indignantly.
“By being a doctor.”
Grace opened her lips to speak, but she was not a ready person, and she felt the thrust. Before she could say anything Mrs. Maynard went on: “There isn't one of them that does n't think you're much more scandalous than if you were the greatest flirt alive. But, I don't mind them, and why should you?”
The serious girl whom she addressed was in that helpless subjection to the truth in which so many New England women pass their lives. She could not deny the truth which lurked in the exaggeration of these words, and it unnerved her, as the fact that she was doing what the vast majority of women considered unwomanly always unnerved her when she suffered herself to think of it. “You are right, Louise,” she said meekly and sadly. “They think as well of you as they do of me.”
“Yes, that's just what I said!” cried Mrs. Maynard, glad of her successful argument.
But however disabled, her friend resumed: “The only safe way for you is to take the ground that so long as you wear your husband's name you must honor it, no matter how cruel and indifferent to you he has been.”
“Yes,” assented Mrs. Maynard ruefully, “of course.”
“I mean that you must n't even have the appearance of liking admiration, or what you call attentions. It's wicked.”
“I suppose so,” murmured the culprit.
“You have been brought up to have such different ideas of divorce from what I have,” continued Grace, “that I don't feel as if I had any right to advise you about what you are to do after you gain your suit.”
“I shall not want to get married again for one while; I know that much,” Mrs. Maynard interpolated self-righteously.
“But till you do gain it, you ought not to regard it as emancipating you in the slightest degree.”
“No,” came in sad assent from the victim of the law's delays.
“And I want you to promise me that you won't go walking with Mr. Libby any more; and that you won't even see him alone, after this.”
“Why, but Grace!” cried Mrs. Maynard, as much in amazement as in annoyance. “You don't seem to understand! Have n't I told you he was a friend of the family? He's quite as much Mr. Maynard's friend as he is mine. I'm sure,” she added, “if I asked Mr. Libby, I should never think of getting divorced. He's all for George; and it's as much as I can do to put up with him.”
“No matter. That does n't alter the appearance to people here. I don't wish you to go with him alone any more.”
“Well, Grace, I won't,” said Mrs. Maynard earnestly. “I won't, indeed. And that makes me think: he wanted you to go along this morning.”
“To go along? Wanted me—What are you talking about?”
“Why, I suppose that's his boat, out there, now.” Mrs. Maynard pointed to a little craft just coming to anchor inside the reef. “He said he wanted me to take a sail with him, this morning; and he said he would come up and ask you, too. I do hope you'll go, Grace. It's just as calm; and he always has a man with him to help sail the boat, so there is n't the least danger.” Grace looked at her in silent sorrow, and Mrs. Maynard went on with sympathetic seriousness: “Oh! there's one thing I want to ask you about, Grace: I don't like to have any concealments from you.” Grace did not speak, but she permitted Mrs. Maynard to proceed: “Barlow recommended it, and he's lived here a great while. His brother took it, and he had the regular old New England consumption. I thought I shouldn't like to try it without your knowing it.”
“Try it? What are you talking about, Louise?”
“Why, whiskey with white-pine chips in it.”
Grace rose, and moved towards the door, with the things dropping from her lap. One of these was a spool, that rolled down the steps and out upon the sandy road. She turned to pursue it, and recovered it at the cost of dropping her scissors and thimble out of opposite sides of her skirt, which she had gathered up apronwise to hold her work. When she rose from the complicated difficulty, in which Mrs. Maynard had amiably lent her aid, she confronted Mr. Libby, who was coming towards them from the cliff. She gave him a stiff nod, and attempted to move away; but in turning round and about she had spun herself into the folds of a stout linen thread escaping from its spool. These gyves not only bound her skirts but involved her feet in an extraordinary mesh, which tightened at the first step and brought her to a standstill.
Mrs. Maynard began to laugh and cough, as Mr. Libby came to her friend's help. He got the spool in his hand, and walked around her in the endeavor to free her; but in vain. She extended him the scissors with the stern passivity of a fate. “Cut it,” she commanded, and Mr. Libby knelt before her and obeyed. “Thanks,” she said, taking back the scissors; and now she sat down again, and began deliberately to put up her work in her handkerchief.
“I 'll go out and get my things. I won't be gone half a minute, Mr. Libby,” said Mrs. Maynard, with her first breath, as she vanished indoors.
Mr. Libby leaned against the post lately occupied by the factotum in his talk with Mrs. Maynard, and looked down at Grace as she bent over her work. If he wished to speak to her, and was wavering as to the appropriate style of address for a handsome girl, who was at once a young lady and a physician, she spared him the agony of a decision by looking up at him suddenly.
“I hope,” he faltered, “that you feel like a sail, this morning? Did Mrs. Maynard—”
“I shall have to excuse myself,” answered Grace, with a conscience against saying she was sorry. “I am a very bad sailor.”
“Well, so am I, for that matter,” said Mr. Libby. “But it's smooth as a pond, to-day.”
Grace made no direct response, and he grew visibly uncomfortable under the cold abstraction of the gaze with which she seemed to look through him. “Mrs. Maynard tells me you came over with her from Europe.”
“Oh yes!” cried the young man, the light of pleasant recollection kindling in his gay eyes. “We had a good time. Maynard was along: he's a first-rate fellow. I wish he were here.”
“Yes,” said Grace, “I wish so, too.” She did not know what to make of this frankness of the young man's, and she did not know whether to consider him very depraved or very innocent. In her question she continued to stare at him, without being aware of the embarrassment to which she was putting him.
“I heard of Mrs. Maynard's being here, and I thought I should find him, too. I came over yesterday to get him to go into the woods with us.”
Grace decided that this was mere effrontery. “It is a pity that he is not here,” she said; and though it ought to have been possible for her to go on and rebuke the young fellow for bestowing upon Mrs. Maynard the comradeship intended for her husband, it was not so. She could only look severely at him, and trust that he might conceive the intention which she could not express. She rebelled against the convention and against her own weakness, which would not let her boldly interfere in what she believed a wrong; she had defied society, in the mass, but here, with this man, whom as an atom of the mass she would have despised, she was powerless.
“Have you ever seen him?”