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The Doctor’s Story
by
The literature teacher counted for something in the affair, and I imagine that it was never talked over between the parents and daughter, who soon after left town for Europe, and for three years were not seen in Boston.
When they did return, it was to announce the marriage of the Principal Girl to the son of the family lawyer, a clever man, and a rising politician.
Relations between the literature teacher and the Principal Girl had never wholly broken off, so ten years after the school adventure it happened one beautiful day in early September that the teacher was a guest at the North Shore summer home of the Principal Girl, now the mother of two handsome boys.
That afternoon at tea, sitting on the verandah, watching the white sails as the yachts made for Marblehead harbor, and the long line of surf beating against the rugged rocks beyond the wide pebbly beach on which the dragging stones made weird music, the literature teacher, supposing the old story to be so much ancient history that it could, as can so many of the incidents of one’s teens, be referred to lightly, had the misfortune to mention it. To her horror, the Principal Girl gave her one startled look, and then rolled over among the cushions of the hammock in which she was swinging, and burst into a torrent of tears.
When the paroxysm had passed, she sat up, wiped her eyes in which, however, there was no laughter, and said passionately:
“I suppose you think me the most ungrateful woman in the world. I know only too well that to many women my position has always appeared enviable. Poor things, if they only knew! Of course, my husband is a good man. In all ways I do him perfect justice. He is everything that is kind and generous–only, alas, he is not the lover of my dreams. My children are nice handsome boys, but they are the every day children of every day life. I dreamed another and a different life in which my children were oh, so different, and beside which the life I try to lead with all the strength I have is no more like the life I dreamed than my boys are like my dream children. If you think it has not taken courage to play the part I have played, I am sorry for your lack of insight.”
And she got up, and walked away.
It was as well, for, as the literature teacher told the doctor afterward, it was one notch above her experience, and she absolutely could have found no word to say. When the Wife came back to the hammock, ten minutes later, the cloud was gone from her face, and she never mentioned the subject again. And you may be sure that the literature teacher never did. She always looked upon the incident as her worst moment of tactlessness.
* * * * *
“Bully, bully!” exclaimed the Lawyer, “Take off your laurels, Critic, and crown the Doctor!”
“For that little tale,” shouted the Critic. “Never! That has not a bit of literary merit. It has not one rounded period.”
“The Lawyer is a realist,” said the Sculptor. “Of course that appeals to him.”
“If you want my opinion, I consider that there is just as much imagination in that story as in the morbid rigmarole you threw at us last night,” persisted the Lawyer.
“Why,” declared the Critic, “I call mine a healthy story compared with this one. It is a shocking tale for the operating room–I mean the insane asylum.”
“All right,” laughed the Doctor, “then we had all better go inside the sanitarium walls at once.”
“Do you presume,” said the Journalist, “to pretend that this is a normal incident?”
“I am not going into that. I only claim that more people know the condition than dare to confess it. It is after all only symbolic of the duality of the soul–or call it what you like. It is the embodiment of a truth which no one thinks of denying–that the spirit has its secrets. Imagination plays a great part in most of our lives–it is the glory that gilds our facts–it is the brilliant barrier which separates us from the beasts, and the only real thing that divides us into classes, though, of course, it does not run through the world like straight lines of latitude and longitude, but like the lines of mean temperature.”