plicated life; where, the only medical man in a growing
community, he had learned to form his own sturdy decisions and then to
abide by them.

Black and white, right and wrong, the proper course and the improper
course--he lived in a sort of two-dimensional ethical world. But to Lucy
Crosby, between black and white there was a gray no-man's land of doubt
and indecision; a half-way house of compromise, and sometimes David
frightened her. He was so sure.

She passed the open door into the waiting-room, where sat two or three
patient and silent figures, and went back to the kitchen. Minnie, the
elderly servant, sat by the table reading, amid the odor of roasting
chicken; outside the door on the kitchen porch was the freezer
containing the dinner ice-cream. An orderly Sunday peace was in the air,
a gesture of homely comfort, order and security.

Minnie got up.

"I'll unpin your veil for you," she offered, obligingly. "You've got
time to lie down about ten minutes. Mrs. Morgan said she's got to have
her ears treated."

"I hope she doesn't sit and talk for an hour."

"She'll talk, all right," Minnie observed, her mouth full of pins.
"She'd be talking to me yet if I'd stood there. She's got her nerve,
too, that woman."

"I don't like to hear you speak so of the patients who come to the
house, Minnie."

"Well, I don't like their asking me questions about the family either,"
said Minnie, truculently. "She wanted to know who was Doctor Dick's
mother. Said she had had a woman here from Wyoming, and she thought
she'd known his people."

Mrs. Crosby stood very still.

"I think she should bring her questions to the family," she said, after
a silence. "Thank you, Minnie."

Bonnet in hand, she moved toward the stairs, climbed them and went into
her room. Recently life had been growing increasingly calm and less
beset with doubts. For the first time, with Dick's coming to live with
them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had found a vicarious
maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had been very happy. The war
was over and he was safely back; again she could sew on his buttons and
darn his socks, and turn down his bed at night. He filled the old house
with cheer and with vitality. And, as David gave up more and more of
the work, he took it on his broad shoulders, efficient, tireless, and
increasingly popular.

She put her bonnet away in its box, and suddenly there rose in her frail
old body a fierce and unexpe