“I guess I'll be getting along,” he said. “Will you be home to dinner?”
“I think not. I'll—I'm going to run out of town, and eat where it's cool.”
The Street was notoriously hot in summer. When Dr. Max was newly home from Europe, and Dr. Ed was selling a painfully acquired bond or two to furnish the new offices downtown, the brothers had occasionally gone together, by way of the trolley, to the White Springs Hotel for supper. Those had been gala days for the older man. To hear names that he had read with awe, and mispronounced, most of his life, roll off Max's tongue—“Old Steinmetz” and “that ass of a Heydenreich”; to hear the medical and surgical gossip of the Continent, new drugs, new technique, the small heart-burnings of the clinics, student scandal—had brought into his drab days a touch of color. But that was over now. Max had new friends, new social obligations; his time was taken up. And pride would not allow the older brother to show how he missed the early days.
Forty-two he was, and, what with sleepless nights and twenty years of hurried food, he looked fifty. Fifty, then, to Max's thirty.
“There's a roast of beef. It's a pity to cook a roast for one.”
Wasteful, too, this cooking of food for two and only one to eat it. A roast of beef meant a visit, in Dr. Ed's modest-paying clientele. He still paid the expenses of the house on the Street.
“Sorry, old man; I've made another arrangement.”
They left the hospital together. Everywhere the younger man received the homage of success. The elevator-man bowed and flung the doors open, with a smile; the pharmacy clerk, the doorkeeper, even the convalescent patient who was polishing the great brass doorplate, tendered their tribute. Dr. Ed looked neither to right nor left.
At the machine they separated. But Dr. Ed stood for a moment with his hand on the car.
“I was thinking, up there this afternoon,” he said slowly, “that I'm not sure I want Sidney Page to become a nurse.”
“Why?”
“There's a good deal in life that a girl need not know—not, at
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