officer, half of secretary, till his senior cut through him in midsentence.
“We have gone a certain way,” he said mildly. “It’s you, Doctor Diver, who can best help us now.”
Routed out, Dick confessed: “I’m not so straight on it myself.”
“I have nothing to do with your personal reactions,” said Dohmler. “But I have much to do with the fact that this so-called ‘transference,’” he darted a short ironic look at Franz which the latter returned in kind, “must be terminated. Miss Nicole does well indeed, but she is in no condition to survive what she might interpret as a tragedy.”
Again Franz began to speak, but Doctor Dohmler motioned him silent.
“I realize that your position has been difficult.”
“Yes, it has.”
Now the professor sat back and laughed, saying on the last syllable of his laughter, with his sharp little gray eyes shining through: “Perhaps you have got sentimentally involved yourself.”
Aware that he was being drawn on, Dick, too, laughed.
“She’s a pretty girl — anybody responds to that to a certain extent. I have no intention—”
Again Franz tried to speak — again Dohmler stopped him with a question directed pointedly at Dick. “Have you thought of going away?”
“I can’t go away.”
Doctor Dohmler turned to Franz: “Then we can send Miss Warren away.”
“As you think best, Professor Dohmler,” Dick conceded. “It’s certainly a situation.”
Professor Dohmler raised himself like a legless man mounting a pair of crutches.
“But it is a professional situation,” he cried quietly.
He sighed himself back into his chair, waiting for the reverberating thunder to die out about the room. Dick saw that Dohmler had reached his climax, and he was not sure that he himself had survived it. When the thunder had diminished Franz managed to get his word in.
“Doctor Diver is a man of fine character,” he said. “I feel he only has to appreciate the situation in order to deal correctly with it. In my opinion Dick can cooperate right here, without any one going away.”
“How do you feel about that?” Professor Dohmler asked Dick.
Dick felt churlish in the face of the situation; at the same time he realized in the silence after Dohmler’s pronouncement that the state of inanimation could not be indefinitely prolonged; suddenly he spilled everything.
“I’m half in love with her — the question of marrying her has passed through my mind.”
“Tch! Tch!” uttered Franz.
“Wait.” Dohmler warned him. Franz refused to wait: “What! And devote half your life to being doctor and nurse and all — never! I know what these cases are. One time in twenty it’s finished in the first push — better never see her again!”
“What do you think?” Dohmler asked Dick.
“Of course Franz is right.”
VII
It was late afternoon when they wound up the discussion as to what Dick should do, he must be most kind and yet eliminate himself. When the doctors stood up at last, Dick’s eyes fell outside the window to where a light rain was falling — Nicole was waiting, expectant, somewhere in that rain. When, presently, he went out buttoning his oilskin at the throat, pulling down the brim of his hat, he came upon her immediately under the roof of the main entrance.
“I know a new place we can go,” she said. “When I was ill I didn’t mind sitting inside with the others in the evening — what they said seemed like everything else. Naturally now I see them as ill and it’s — it’s—”
“You’ll be leaving soon.”
“Oh, soon. My sister, Beth, but she’s always been called Baby, she’s coming in a few weeks to take me somewhere; after that I’ll be back here for a last month.”
“The older sister?”
“Oh, quite a bit older. She’s twenty-four — she’s very English. She lives in London with my father’s sister. She was engaged to an Englishman but he was killed — I never saw him.”
Her face, ivory gold against the blurred sunset that strove through the rain, had a promise Dick had never seen before: the high cheekbones, the faintly wan quality, cool rather than feverish, was reminiscent of the frame of a promising colt — a creature whose life did not promise to be only a projection of youth upon a grayer screen, but instead, a true growing; the face would be handsome in middle life; it would be handsome in old age: the essential structure and the economy were there.
“What are you looking at?”
“I was just thinking that you’re going to be rather happy.”
Nicole was frightened: “Am I? All right — things couldn’t be worse than they have been.”
In the covered woodshed to which she had led him, she sat cross-legged upon her golf shoes, her burberry wound about her and her cheeks stung alive by the damp air. Gravely she returned his gaze, taking in his somewhat proud carriage that never quite yielded to the wooden post against which he leaned; she looked into his face that always tried to discipline itself into molds of attentive seriousness, after excursions into joys and mockeries of its own. That part of him which seemed to fit his reddish Irish coloring she knew least; she was afraid of it, yet more anxious to explore — this was his more masculine side: the other part, the trained part, the consideration in the polite eyes, she expropriated without question, as most women did.
“At least this institution has been good for languages,” said Nicole. “I’ve spoken French with two doctors, and German with the nurses, and Italian, or something like it, with a couple of scrubwomen and one of the patients, and I’ve picked up a lot of Spanish from another.”
“That’s fine.”
He tried to arrange an attitude but no logic seemed forthcoming.
“ — Music too. Hope you didn’t think I was only interested in ragtime. I practise every day — the last few months I’ve been taking a course in Zurich on the history of music. In fact it was all that kept me going at times — music and the drawing.” She leaned suddenly and twisted a loose strip from the sole of her shoe and then looked up. “I’d like to draw you just the way you are now.”
It made him sad when she brought out her accomplishments for his approval.
“I envy you. At present I don’t seem to be interested in anything except my work.”
“Oh, I think that’s fine for a man,” she said quickly. “But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children.”
“I suppose so,” said Dick with deliberated indifference.
Nicole sat quiet. Dick wished she would speak so that he could play the easy rôle of wet blanket, but now she sat quiet.
“You’re all well,” he said. “Try to forget the past; don’t overdo things for a year or so. Go back to America and be a débutante and fall in love — and be happy.”
“I couldn’t fall in love.” Her injured shoe scraped a cocoon of dust from the log on which she sat.
“Sure you can,” Dick insisted. “Not for a year maybe, but sooner or later.” Then he added brutally: “You can have a perfectly normal life with