n don't attract me,"
Johnny said.

But that Maurice found "looks" attractive, began to be obvious to
Eleanor, who, night after night, at the dinner table, watched the
smiling, shining, careless thing--Youth!--sitting there on Maurice's
right, and felt herself withering in the dividing years. As a result,
the annoyance which, when Edith was a child, she had felt at her
childishness, began to harden into irritation at her womanliness. "I
_wish I_ could get her out of the house!" she used to think, helplessly.

She felt this irritation especially when they all went, one night, to
dine with Tom Morton, who had just married and gone to housekeeping. It
was a somewhat looked-forward-to event, although Eleanor thought Edith
too young to dine out, and also the shabbiness of Maurice's evening
clothes was on her mind. "Do get a new dress suit!" she urged; and he
gave the stereotyped answer: "Can't afford it."

They started for the Mortons' gayly enough; but Maurice's gayety went
out like a candle in the wind when, as he followed Eleanor and Edith
into the parlor, he saw, and after a puzzled moment recognized, the
third man in the Morton dinner of six--the man who had stood in Lily's
little hall and said that the child would "pull through." ... The
spiritual squalor of that scene flashed back in sharp visualization: the
doctor; Lily, her amber eyes overflowing with tears, kissing his hand;
Jacky's fretful cry from upstairs.... Here he was! that same kindly
medical man, "getting off some guff to Mrs. Morton," Maurice told
himself, in agonized uncertainty as to what he had better do. Should he
recognize him? Or pretend not to know him? It galloped through his mind
that if he did "know" him, Eleanor would ask questions. Oh, he knew
Eleanor's questions! But if he didn't "know" him, Doctor Nelson would
know that questions might be asked. The instant's hesitation between the
two risks was decided by Doctor Nelson. He put out his hand and said,
"Oh, how are you?" So Maurice said, "Oh, how are you?" as carelessly as
anybody else.

Eleanor, when the doctor was introduced, said, a little surprised, "You
know my husband?"

"I think I've met Mr. Curtis somewhere," Doctor Nelson said, vaguely.

"He knows so many people I don't," she thought, but she said nothing. No
one noticed her silence--or Maurice's, either! The doctor, and Morton,
and the handsome bride, were listening to Edith, amused, apparently, at
her crudity and ignorance.