d down and scouted forward
for things more recent.

"Laura Bowman"--through one entry after another Gilbert kicked that poor
woman's name like a football. Very fine and righteous and high-minded in
what he said, but writing it out in full and calling her painful
difficulties--the writhing of a sensitive, high-strung woman, mismated
with a tyrant--an example notably stupid and unoriginal, of the eternal
matrimonial triangle. Bowman evidently kept his sympathy, so far as
such a nature can be said to entertain that gentle emotion.

I ran through other volumes, merciless recitals, now and again, of the
shortcomings of his associates or servants; a cold blooded
misrepresentation of his son; a sneer for the affair with Ina Thornhill,
with the dictum, sound enough no doubt, that the girl herself did the
courting, and that she had no conscience--"The extreme society type of
parasite," he put it. And then the account of his break with Edwards.

Dr. Bowman, it seems, had come to Gilbert in confidence for help, saying
that his wife had left his house in the small hours the previous night,
nothing but an evening wrap pulled over her night wear, and that he
guessed where she could be found, since she hadn't gone to her mother's.
He asked Gilbert to be his ambassador with messages of pardon. Didn't
want to go himself, because that would mean a row, and he was
determined, if possible, to keep the thing private, giving a generous
reason: that he wasn't willing to disgrace the woman. All of which,
after he'd written it down, the diarist discredited with his brief
comment to the effect that Tony Bowman shunned publicity because scandal
of the sort would hurt his practice, and his pride as well, and that he
didn't go out to Jim Edwards's ranch because, under these circumstances,
he would be afraid of Jim.

Thomas Gilbert did the doctor's errand for him. The entry concerning it
occupied the next day. I read between the lines how much he enjoyed his
position of god from the machine, swooping down on the two he found out
there, estimating their situation and behavior in his usual
hair-splitting fashion, sitting as a court of last appeal. It was of no
use for Edwards to explain to him that Laura Bowman was practically
crazy when she walked out of her husband's house as the culmination of a
miserable scene--the sort that had been more and more frequent there of
late--carrying black-and-blue marks where he had grabbed and shaken her.
The st