Dr. Breen's Practice. William Dean Howells

worse than one woman; and it was in no representative or exemplary character that she had chosen her course. At the same time that she held these sane opinions, she believed that she had put away the hopes with the pleasures that might once have taken her as a young girl. In regard to what had changed the current of her life, she mentally asserted her mere nullity, her absolute non-existence. The thought of it no longer rankled, and that interest could never be hers again. If it had not been so much like affectation, and so counter to her strong aesthetic instinct, she might have made her dress somehow significant of her complete abeyance in such matters; but as it was she only studied simplicity, and as we have seen from the impression of the barge-driver she did not finally escape distinction in dress and manner. In fact, she could not have escaped that effect if she would; and it was one of the indomitable contradictions of her nature that she would not.

      When she came back to the croquet-ground, leading the little girl by the hand, she found Mrs. Maynard no longer alone and no longer sad. She was chatting and laughing with a slim young fellow, whose gay blue eyes looked out of a sunburnt face, and whose straw hat, carried in his hand, exposed a closely shaven head. He wore a suit of gray flannel, and Mrs. Maynard explained that he was camping on the beach at Birkman's Cove, and had come over in the steamer with her when she returned from Europe. She introduced him as Mr. Libby, and said, “Oh, Bella, you dirty little thing!”

      Mr. Libby bowed anxiously to Grace, and turned for refuge to the little girl. “Hello, Bella!” “Hello!” said the child. “Remember me?” The child put her left hand on that of Grace holding her right, and prettily pressed her head against the girl's arm in bashful silence. Grace said some coldly civil words to the young man: without looking at Mrs. Maynard, and passed on into the house.

      “You don't mean that's your doctor?” he scarcely more than whispered.

      “Yes, I do,” answered Mrs. Maynard. “Is n't she too lovely? And she's just as good! She used to stand up at school for me, when all the girls were down on me because I was Western. And when I came East, this time, I just went right straight to her house. I knew she could tell me exactly what to do. And that's the reason I'm here. I shall always recommend this air to anybody with lung difficulties. It's the greatest thing! I'm almost another person. Oh, you need n't look after her, Mr. Libby! There's nothing flirtatious about Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard.

      The young man recovered himself from his absentminded stare in the direction Grace had taken, with a frank laugh. “So much the better for a fellow, I should say!”

      Grace handed the little girl over to her nurse, and went to her own room, where she found her mother waiting to go down to tea.

      “Where is Mrs. Maynard?” asked Mrs. Breen.

      “Out on the croquet-ground,” answered the daughter.

      “I should think it would be damp,” suggested Mrs. Green.

      “She will come in when the tea-bell rings. She wouldn't come in now, if I told her.”

      “Well,” said the elder lady, “for a person who lets her doctor pay her board, I think 'she's very independent.”

      “I wish you would n't speak of that, mother,” said the girl.

      “I can't help it, Grace. It's ridiculous,—that's what it is; it's ridiculous.”

      “I don't see anything ridiculous in it. A physician need not charge anything unless he chooses, or she; and if I choose to make Louise my guest here it's quite the same as if she were my guest at home.”

      “I don't like you to have such a guest,” said Mrs. Green. “I don't see what claim she has upon your hospitality.”

      “She has a double claim upon it,” Grace answered, with a flush. “She is in sickness and in trouble. I don't see how she could have a better claim. Even if she were quite well I should consider the way she had been treated by her husband sufficient, and I should want to do everything I could for her.”

      “I should want her to behave herself,” said Mrs. Breen dryly.

      “How behave herself? What do you mean?” demanded Grace, with guilty heat.

      “You know what I mean, Grace. A woman in her position ought to be more circumspect than any other woman, if she wants people to believe that her husband treated her badly.”

      “We ought n't to blame her for trying to forget her troubles. It's essential to her recovery for her to be as cheerful as she can be. I know that she's impulsive, and she's free in her manners with strangers; but I suppose that's her Westernism. She's almost distracted. She was crying half the night, with her troubles, and kept Bella and me both awake.”

      “Is Bella with her now?”

      “No,” Grace admitted. “Jane's getting her ready to go down with us. Louise is talking with a gentleman who came over on the steamer with her; he's camping on the beach near here. I didn't wait to hear particulars.”

      When the nurse brought the little girl to their door, Mrs. Green took one hand and Grace the other, and they led her down to tea. Mrs. Maynard was already at table, and told them all about meeting Mr. Libby abroad.

      Until the present time she and Grace had not seen each other since they were at school together in Southington, where the girl used to hear so much to the disadvantage of her native section that she would hardly have owned to it if her accent had not found her out. It would have been pleasanter to befriend another person, but the little Westerner suffered a veritable persecution, and that was enough to make Grace her friend. Shortly after she returned home from school she married, in that casual and tentative fashion in which so many marriages seem made. Grace had heard of her as travelling in Europe with her husband, from whom she was now separated. She reported that he had known Mr. Libby in his bachelor days, and that Mr. Libby had travelled with them. Mr. Maynard appeared to have left to Mr. Libby the arrangement of his wife's pleasures, the supervision of her shopping, and the direction of their common journeys and sojourns; and it seemed to have been indifferent to him whether his friend was smoking and telling stories with him, or going with his wife to the opera, or upon such excursions as he had no taste for. She gave the details of the triangular intimacy with a frank unconsciousness; and after nine o'clock she returned from a moonlight walk on the beach with Mr. Libby.

      Grace sat waiting for her at the little one's bedside, for Bella had been afraid to go to sleep alone.

      “How good you are!” cried Louise, in a grateful under-tone, as she came in. She kissed Grace, and choked down a cough with her hand over her mouth.

      “Louise,” said Grace sternly, “this is shameful! You forget that you are married, and ill, too.”

      “Oh, I'm ever so much better, to-night. The air's just as dry! And you needn't mind Mr. Libby. He's such an old friend! Besides, I'm sure to gain the case.”

      “No matter. Even as a divorced woman, you oughtn't to go on in this way.”

      “Well, I would n't, with every one. But it's quite different with Mr. Libby. And, besides, I have to keep my mind from preying on itself somehow.”

      II.

      Mrs. Maynard sat in the sun on the seaward-looking piazza of the hotel, and coughed in the warm air. She told the ladies, as they came out from breakfast, that she was ever so much better generally, but that she seemed to have more of that tickling in her throat. Each of them advised her for good, and suggested this specific and that; and they all asked her what Miss Breen was doing for her cough. Mrs. Maynard replied, between the paroxysms, that she did not know: it was some kind of powders. Then they said they would think she would want to try something active; even those among them who were homoeopathists insinuated a fine distrust of a physician of their own sex. “Oh, it's nothing serious,” Mrs. Maynard explained. “It's just bronchial. The air will do me more good than anything. I'm keeping out in it all I can.”

      After they were gone, a queer, gaunt man came and glanced from the doorway at her. He