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Dick rose the next morning with a sense of lightness and content that
sent him singing into his shower. In the old stable which now housed
both Nettie and the little car Mike was washing them both with
indiscriminate wavings of the hose nozzle, his old pipe clutched in
his teeth. From below there came up the odors of frying sausages and of
strong hot coffee.
The world was a good place. A fine old place. It had work and play and
love. It had office hours and visits and the golf links, and it had soft
feminine eyes and small tender figures to be always cared for and looked
after.
She liked him. She did not think he was old. She thought his profession
was the finest in the world. She had wondered if he would have time to
come and see her, some day. Time! He considered very seriously, as he
shaved before the slightly distorted mirror in the bathroom, whether
it would be too soon to run in that afternoon, just to see if she was
tired, or had caught cold or anything? Perhaps to-morrow would look
better. No, hang it all, to-day was to-day.
On his way from the bathroom to his bedroom he leaned over the
staircase.
"Aunt Lucy!" he called.
"Yes, Dick?"
"The top of the morning to you. D'you think Minnie would have time to
press my blue trousers this morning?"
There was the sound of her chair being pushed back in the dining-room,
of a colloquy in the kitchen, and Minnie herself appeared below him.
"Just throw them down, Doctor Dick," she said. "I've got an iron hot
now."
"Some day, Minnie," he announced, "you will wear a halo and with the
angels sing."
This mood of unreasoning happiness continued all morning. He went from
house to house, properly grave and responsible but with a small song in
his heart, and about eleven o'clock he found time to stop at the village
haberdasher's and to select a new tie, which he had wrapped and stuffed
in his pocket. And which, inspected in broad day later on a country
road, gave him uneasy qualms as to its brilliance.
At the luncheon table he was almost hilarious, and David played up to
him, albeit rather heavily. But Lucy was thoughtful and quiet. She had a
sense of things somehow closing down on them, of hands reaching out from
the past, and clutching; Mrs. Morgan, Beverly Carlysle, Dick in love and
possibly going back to Norada. Unlike David, who was content that one
emergency had passed, she looked ahead and saw their common life a
series of such chances, with their anxieties and their dangers.