Dr. Breen's Practice - William Dean Howells

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such a VERY fighting-clip as Mr. Libby has on?” asked Mrs. Scott.

      “It must be nice for summer,” returned the elder lady.

      “Yes, it certainly must,” admitted the younger.

      “Really,” said another, “I wish I could go in the fighting-clip. One does n't know what to do with one's hair at the sea-side; it's always in the way.”

      “Your hair would be a public loss, Mrs. Frost,” said Mrs. Alger. The others looked at her hair, as if they had seen it now for the first time.

      “Oh, I don't think so,” said Mrs. Frost, in a sort of flattered coo.

      “Oh, don't have it cut off!” pleaded a young girl, coming up and taking the beautiful mane, hanging loose after the bath, into her hand. Mrs. Frost put her arm round the girl's waist, and pulled her down against her shoulder. Upon reflection she also kissed her.

      Through a superstition, handed down from mother to daughter, that it is uncivil and even unkind not to keep saying something, they went on talking vapidities, where the same number of men, equally vacuous, would have remained silent; and some of them complained that the nervous strain of conversation took away all the good their bath had done them. Miss Gleason, who did not bathe, was also not a talker. She kept a bright-eyed reticence, but was apt to break out in rather enigmatical flashes, which resolved the matter in hand into an abstraction, and left the others with the feeling that she was a person of advanced ideas, but that, while rejecting historical Christianity, she believed in a God of Love. This Deity was said, upon closer analysis, to have proved to be a God of Sentiment, and Miss Gleason was herself a hero-worshiper, or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, “Too bad!” or, “I don't see how you keep-up?” and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing. She seemed to rejoice in keeping herself at a respectful distance, to which she breathlessly retired, as she did now, after waylaying her at the top of the stairs, and confidentially darting at her the words, “I'm so glad you don't like scandal!”

      III.

      After dinner the ladies tried to get a nap, but such of them as re-appeared on the piazza later agreed that it was perfectly useless. They tested every corner for a breeze, but the wind had fallen dead, and the vast sweep of sea seemed to smoulder under the sun. “This is what Mr. Barlow calls having it cooler,” said Mrs. Alger.

      “There are some clouds that look like thunderheads in the west,” said Mrs. Frost, returning from an excursion to the part of the piazza commanding that quarter.

      “Oh, it won't rain to-day,” Mrs. Alger decided.

      “I thought there was always a breeze at Jocelyn's,” Mrs. Scott observed, in the critical spirit of a recent arrival.

      “There always is,” the other explained, “except the first week you're here.”

      A little breath, scarcely more than a sentiment of breeze, made itself felt. “I do believe the wind has changed,” said Mrs. Frost. “It's east.” The others owned one by one that it was so, and she enjoyed the merit of a discoverer; but her discovery was rapidly superseded. The clouds mounted in the west, and there came a time when the ladies disputed whether they had heard thunder or not: a faction contended for the bowling alley, and another faction held for a wagon passing over the bridge just before you reached Jocelyn's. But those who were faithful to the theory of thunder carried the day by a sudden crash that broke over the forest, and, dying slowly away among the low hills, left them deeply silent.

      “Some one,” said Mrs. Alger, “ought to go for those children.” On this it appeared that there were two minds as to where the children were,—whether on the beach or in the woods.

      “Was n't that thunder, Grace?” asked Mrs. Breen, with the accent by which she implicated her daughter in whatever happened.

      “Yes,” said Grace, from where she sat at her window, looking seaward, and waiting tremulously for her mother's next question.

      “Where is Mrs. Maynard?”

      “She is n't back, yet.”

      “Then,” said Mrs. Breen, “he really did expect rough weather.”

      “He must,” returned Grace, in a guilty whisper.

      “It's a pity,” remarked her mother, “that you made them go.”

      “Yes.” She rose, and, stretching herself far out of the window, searched the inexorable expanse of sea. It had already darkened at the verge, and the sails of some fishing-craft flecked a livid wall with their white, but there was no small boat in sight.

      “If anything happened to them,” her mother continued, “I should feel terribly for you.”

      “I should feel terribly for myself,” Grace responded, with her eyes still seaward.

      “Where do you think they went?”

      “I did n't ask,” said the girl. “I wouldn't,” she added, in devotion to the whole truth.

      “Well, it is all of the same piece,” said Mrs. Breen. Grace did not ask what the piece was. She remained staring at the dark wall across the sea, and spiritually confronting her own responsibility, no atom of which she rejected. She held herself in every way responsible,—for doubting that poor young fellow's word, and then for forcing that reluctant creature to go with him, and forbidding by her fierce insistence any attempt of his at explanation; she condemned herself to perpetual remorse with even greater zeal than her mother would have sentenced her, and she would not permit herself any respite when a little sail, which she knew for theirs, blew round the point. It seemed to fly along just on the hither side of that mural darkness, skilfully tacking to reach the end of the-reef before the wall pushed it on the rocks. Suddenly, the long low stretch of the reef broke into white foam, and then passed from sight under the black wall, against which the little sail still flickered. The girl fetched a long, silent breath. They were inside the reef, in comparatively smooth water, and to her ignorance they were safe. But the rain would be coming in another moment, and Mrs. Maynard would be drenched; and Grace would be to blame for her death. She ran to the closet, and pulled down her mother's India-rubber cloak and her own, and fled out-of-doors, to be ready on the beach with the wrap, against their landing. She met the other ladies on the stairs and in the hall, and they clamored at her; but she glided through them like something in a dream, and then she heard a shouting in her ear, and felt herself caught and held up against the wind.

      “Where in land be you goin', Miss Breen?”

      Barlow, in a long, yellow oil-skin coat and sou'wester hat, kept pushing her forward to the edge of the cliff, as he asked.

      “I'm going down to meet them!” she screamed.

      “Well, I hope you WILL meet 'em. But I guess you better go back to the house. Hey? WUNT? Well; come along, then, if they ain't past doctorin' by the time they git ashore! Pretty well wrapped up, any way!” he roared; and she perceived that she had put on her waterproof and drawn the hood over her head.

      Those steps to the beach had made her giddy when she descended with leisure for such dismay; but now, with the tempest flattening her against the stair-case, and her gossamer clutching and clinging to every surface, and again twisting itself about her limbs, she clambered down as swiftly and recklessly as Barlow himself, and followed over the beach beside the men who were pulling a boat down the sand at a run.

      “Let me get in!” she screamed. “I wish to go with you!”

      “Take hold of the girl, Barlow!” shouted one of the men. “She's crazy.”

      He

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