Mrs. Ewing turned quite white.  “Oh, Tom,” she murmured, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did not tell you, Clara dear, because you would immediately have had the child in a galloping consumption, and it is really nothing at all.  I only want to be on the safe side.”

“It is a very little pain, mother dear,” said Clemency.  When Clemency spoke to Mrs. Ewing, her voice had a singing quality.  At such times, although the young man’s very soul was possessed of the mother, he could not help viewing the daughter with favor.  But he was puzzled about the pleurisy.  The girl seemed to him entirely well, although she was losing a little of her warm color from staying indoors.  Still, after all, a pain is as invisible as a spirit.  Her friend, Annie Lipton, spent a few days with her, and then James saw very little of Clemency.  The two girls sat together in Clemency’s room, and only the Lord of innocence and ignorance knew what they talked about.  They talked a great deal.  James, whenever he was in the house, was conscious of the distant murmur of their sweet young voices, although he could not distinguish a word.  Annie Lipton was a prettier girl than Clemency, though without her personal charm.  Her beauty seemed to abash her, and make her indignant.  She was a girl who should have been a nun, and viewed love and lovers from behind iron bars.  She treated James with exceeding coolness.

“Annie Lipton is an anomaly,” Doctor Gordon remarked once over his after-dinner pipe, when they sat in the study listening to the feminine murmur on the other side of the wall.  It sounded like the gentle ripple of a summer sea.

“Why?” returned James.

“She defies her sex,” replied Doctor Gordon, “and still there is nothing mannish about her.  She is a woman angry and ashamed at her womanhood.  If she ever marries, it will be at the cost of a terrible mental struggle.  There are women-haters among men, and there are a very few—­so few as to rank with albinos and white blackbirds in scarcity—­man-haters among women.  Annie is a man-hater.”

“She is very pretty, too,” said James.

“If you attempt the conquest, I’ll warn you there will be scaling ladders and all the ancient paraphernalia of siege needed,” said Doctor Gordon laughingly.  James colored.

“It may be that I am a woman-hater,” he replied, and looked very young.  Doctor Gordon again laughed.

A little later they went to Georgie K.’s.  They went nearly every evening while Annie Lipton was with Clemency.  After she had left they did not go so often.  “It is pretty dull for Clemency,” Doctor Gordon would say, and they would remain at home and play whist with the two ladies.  James began to be quite sure that Doctor Gordon’s visits to Georgie K.’s were mostly made when Mrs. Ewing looked worse than usual and did not eat her dinner.  James became convinced in his own mind that Mrs. Ewing was not well, although he never dared broach the subject again to the doctor, and although it made no difference whatever in his own attitude toward her.  As well might he have turned his back upon the Venus, because of some slight abrasion which her beautiful body had received from the ages.