"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 unexpected resentment against David.
He had chosen a course and abided by it. He had even now no doubt
or falterings. Just as in the first anxious days there had been
no doubt in him as to the essential rightness of what he was doing.