She passed the open door into the waiting-room, where sat two or three patient and silent figures, and went back to the kitchen.  Minnie, the elderly servant, sat by the table reading, amid the odor of roasting chicken; outside the door on the kitchen porch was the freezer containing the dinner ice-cream.  An orderly Sunday peace was in the air, a gesture of homely comfort, order and security.

Minnie got up.

“I’ll unpin your veil for you,” she offered, obligingly.  “You’ve got time to lie down about ten minutes.  Mrs. Morgan said she’s got to have her ears treated.”

“I hope she doesn’t sit and talk for an hour.”

“She’ll talk, all right,” Minnie observed, her mouth full of pins.  “She’d be talking to me yet if I’d stood there.  She’s got her nerve, too, that woman.”

“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.  And now—­This was what came of taking a life and moulding it in accordance with a predetermined plan.  That was for God to do, not man.

She sat down near her window and rocked slowly, to calm herself.  Outside the Sunday movement of the little suburban town went by:  the older Wheeler girl, Nina, who had recently married Leslie Ward, in her smart little car; Harrison Miller, the cynical bachelor who lived next door, on his way to the station news stand for the New York papers; young couples taking small babies for the air in a perambulator; younger couples, their eyes on each other and on the future.

That, too, she reflected bitterly!  Dick was in love.  She had not watched him for that very thing for so long without being fairly sure now.  She had caught, as simple David with his celibate heart could never have caught, the tone in Dick’s voice when he mentioned the Wheelers.  She had watched him for the past few months in church on Sunday mornings, and she knew that as she watched him, so he looked at Elizabeth.