"
Then as he sat chatting with me so kind and good--there's something
about Dr. Denbigh that makes me think of my own father, although he is
young enough to be my son--I told him the whole thing, all except Aunt
Elizabeth's share in it. I merely told him that Henry Goward had
written to her and not to Peggy.
I felt very much better. He took what I told him seriously, and yet not
in the tragic way we did. He has a way of listening that is very
comforting.
"It seems absurd, I know, for an old woman like me to get upset just
because her grandchild does not get letters from her sweetheart," I
told him. "But you see, doctor, no one suffers alone in a family like
ours. An event like this is like a wave that disturbs the whole surface
of the water. Every one of us feels anything that happens, each in his
separate way. Why, I can't be sick without its causing inconvenience to
Billy." And it is true; people in this world are bound up together in
an extraordinary fashion; and I wondered if Henry Goward's mother was
unhappy too, and was wondering what it was Peggy had done to her boy,
for she, of course, will think whatever happens is Peggy's fault. The
engagement of these two young people has been like a stone thrown into
a pond, and it takes only a very little pebble to ruffle the water
farther than one would believe it possible.
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