Part 8

“About forty per cent, of the wholly blind. But the half-blind and the nervously wrecked victims of eye-strain owe their woes generally to sheer carelessness and neglect. By the way, eye-strain itself may cause very serious forms of disease, such as obstinate and dangerous forms of indigestion, insomnia, or even St. Vitus’s dance and epilepsy.”

“But you’re not telling us anything about eye diseases, Dr. Strong,” said Julia.

“There speaks our Committee on School Conditions, filled full of information,” said the Health Master with a smile. “Junkum has made an important discovery, and made it in time. She has found that two children recently transferred from Number 14 have red eyes.”

“Maybe they’ve been crying,” suggested Bettykin.

“They were when I saw them, acute Miss Twinkles, although they didn’t mean it at all. One was crying out of one eye, and one out of the other, which gave them a very curious, absurd, and interesting appearance. They had each a developing case of pink-eye.”

“Horses have pink-eye, not people,” remarked Grandma Sharpless.

“To be more accurate, then, conjunctivitis. People have that; a great many people, once it gets started. It looks very bad and dangerous; but it isn’t if properly cared for. Only, it’s quite contagious. Therefore the Committee on Schools, with myself as acting executive, accomplished the temporary removal of those children from school.”

“And then,” the Committee joyously took up the tale, “we went out and trailed the pink-eye.”

“We did. We trailed it to its lair in School Number 14, and there we found one of the most dangerous creatures which civilization still allows to exist.”

“In the school?” said Bettykin. “Oo-oo! What was it?”

“It was a Rollertowl,” replied the doctor impressively and in a sonorous voice.

“I never heard of it,” said the Cherub, awestruck. “What is it like?”

“He means a roller-towel, goosie,” explained Julia. “A towel on a roller, that everybody wipes their hands and faces on.”

“Exactly. And because everybody uses it, any contagious disease that anybody has, everybody is liable to catch. I’d as soon put a rattlesnake in a school as a roller-towel. In this case, half the grade where it was had conjunctivitis. But that isn’t the worst. There was one case of trachoma in the grade; a poor little Italian whose parents ignorantly sent her to an optician instead of an oculist. The optician treated her for an ordinary inflammation, and now she will lose the sight of one eye. Meantime, if any of the others have been infected by her, through that roller-towel, there will be trouble, for trachoma is a serious disease.”

“Did you throw out the roller-towel?” asked Charley with a hopeful eye to a fray.

“No. We got thrown out ourselves, didn’t we, Junkum?”

“Pretty near,” corroborated Julia. “The principal told Dr. Strong that he guessed he could run his school himself and he didn’t need any interference by—by—what did he call us, Dr. Strong?”

“Interlopers. No, Cherub, an interloper is no relation to an antelope. It was four days ago that we left that principal and went out and whistled for the Fool-killer. Yesterday, the principal came down with a rose-pink eye of his own; the Health Officer met him and ordered him into quarantine, and the terrible and ferocious Rollertowl is now writhing in its death-agonies on the ash-heap.”

“What about other diseases?” asked Mrs. Clyde after a pause.

“Nothing from me. The eye will report them itself quick enough. And as soon as your eye tells you that anything is the matter with it, you tell the oculist, and you’ll probably get along all right, as far as diseases go. It is not diseases that I have to worry about, as your Chinese-plan physician, so much as it is to see that you give your vision a fair chance. Let’s see. Charley, you’re the Committee on Air, aren’t you? Could you take on a little more work?”

“Try me,” said the boy promptly.

“All right; we’ll make you the Committee on Air and Light, hereafter, with power of protest and report whenever you see your mother going out in a polka-dotted, cross-eyed veil, or your grandmother reading a Bible that needs burning worse than any heretic ever did, or any of the others working or playing without sufficient illumination. Here endeth this lecture, with a final word. This is it:—

“The eye is the most nervous of all the body’s organs. Except in early childhood, when it has the recklessness and overconfidence of unbounded strength, it complains promptly and sharply of ill-usage. Now, there are a few hundred rules about when and how to use the eyes and when and how not to use them. I’m not going to burden you with those. All I’m going to advise you is that when your eyes burn, smart, itch, or feel strained, there’s some reason for it, and you should obey the warning and stop urging them to work against their protest. In fact, I might sum it all up in a motto which I think I’ll hang here in the library—a terse old English slang phrase.”

“What is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“‘Mind your eye,’” replied the Health Master.

VI. THE RE-MADE LADY

“Of all unfortunate times!” lamented Mrs. Clyde, her piquant face twisted to an expression of comic despair. “Why couldn’t he have given us a little more notice?”

Impatiently she tossed aside the telegram which announced that her husband’s old friend, Oren Taylor, the artist, would arrive at seven o’clock that evening.

“Don’t let it bother you, dear,” said Clyde. “I’ll take him to the club for dinner.”

“You can’t. Have you forgotten that I’ve invited Louise Ennis for her quarterly—well—visitation?”

Clyde whistled. “That’s rather a poser. What business have I got to have a cousin like Louise, anyway!”

Upon this disloyal observation Dr. Strong walked into the library. He was a very different Dr. Strong from the nerve-shaken wanderer who had dropped from nowhere into the Clyde household a year previous as its physician on the Chinese plan of being employed to keep the family well. The painful lines of the face were smoothed out. There was a deep light of content, the content of the man who has found his place and filled it, in the level eyes; and about the grave and controlled set of the mouth a sort of sensitive buoyancy of expression. The flesh had hardened and the spirit softened in him.

“Did you hear that, Strong?” inquired Mr. Clyde, turning to him.

“I have trained ears,” answered Dr. Strong solemnly. “They’re absolutely impervious to any speech not intended for them.”

“Open them to this: Louise Ennis is invited for dinner to-night. So is my old friend Oren Taylor, who wires to say that he’s passing through town.”

“Is that Taylor, the artist of ‘The First Parting’? I shall enjoy meeting him.”

“Well, you won’t enjoy meeting Cousin Louise,” declared Mr. Clyde. “We ask her about four times a year, out of family piety. You’ve been lucky to escape her thus far.”

“Rather a painful old party, your cousin?” inquired the physician, smilingly, of Clyde.

“Old? Twenty-two,” said Mrs. Clyde. “But she looks fifty and feels a hundred.”

“Allowing for feminine exaggeration,” amended Clyde.

“But what’s so wrong with her?” demanded the physician.

“Nerves,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Stomach,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Headaches,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Toe-aches,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Too much money,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Too much ego,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Dyspepsia.”

“Hypochondria.”

“Chronic inertia.”

“Set it to music,” suggested Dr. Strong, “and sing it as a duet of disease, from ablepsy to zymosis, inclusively. I shall be immensely interested to observe this prodigy of ills.”

“You’ll have plenty of opportunity,” said Mrs. Clyde rather maliciously. “You’re to sit next to her at dinner to-night.”

“Then put Bettykin on the other side of me,” he returned. “With that combination of elf, tyrant, and angel close at hand, I can turn for relief from the grave to the cradle.”

“Indeed you cannot. Louise can’t endure children. She says they get on her nerves. _My_ children!”

“Now you _have_ put the finishing touch to your character sketch,” observed Dr. Strong. “A woman of child-bearing age who can’t endure children—well, she is pretty far awry.”

“Yet I can remember Louise when she was a sweet, attractive young girl,” sighed Mrs. Clyde. “That was before her mother died, and left her to the care of a father too busy making money to do anything for his only child but spend it on her.”

“You’re talking about Lou Ennis, I know,” said Grandma Sharpless, who had entered in time to hear the closing words.

“Yes,” said. Dr. Strong. “What is our expert diagnostician’s opinion of the case? You know I always defer to you, ma’am, on any problem that’s under the surface of things.”

“None of your soft sawder, young man!” said the old lady, her shrewd, gray eyes twinkling from her shrewd, pink face. “My opinion of Louise Ennis? I’ll give it to you in two words. Just spoiled.”

“Taking my warning as I find it,” remarked the physician, rising, “I shall now retire to put on some chain armor under my evening coat, in case the Terrible Cousin attempts to stab me with an oyster-fork.”

The dinner was not, as Mrs. Clyde was forced to admit afterward, by any means the dismal function which she had anticipated. Oren Taylor, an easy, discursive, humorous talker, set the pace and was ably seconded by Grandma Sharpless, whose knack of incisive and pointed comment served to spur him to his best. Dr. Strong, who said little, attempted to draw Miss Ennis into the current of talk, and was rewarded with an occasional flash of rather acid wit, which caused the artist to look across the table curiously at the girl. So far as he could do so without rudeness, the physician studied his neighbor.

He saw a tall, amply-built girl, with a slackened frame whose muscles had forgotten how to play their part properly in holding the structure firm. Her face was flaccid. Under the large but dull eyes, there was a bloodless puffiness. Discontent sat enthroned at the corners of the sensitive mouth. A faint, reddish eruption disfigured her chin. Her two strong assets, beautifully even teeth and a wealth of soft, fine hair, failed wholly to save her from being a flatly repellent woman. Dr. Strong noted further that her hands were incessantly uneasy, and that she ate little and without interest. Also she seemed, in a sullen way, shy. Yet, despite all of these drawbacks, there was a pathetic suggestion of inherent fineness about her; of qualities become decadent through disuse; a charm that should have been, thwarted and perverted by a slovenly habit of life. Dr. Strong set her down as a woman at war with herself, and therefore with her world.

After dinner Mr. and Mrs. Clyde slipped away to see the children. The artist followed Dr. Strong, to whom he had taken a liking, as most men did, into the small lounging-room, where he lighted a cigar.

“Too bad about that Miss Ennis, isn’t it?” said Taylor abruptly.

His companion looked at him interrogatively.

“Such a mess,” he continued. “Such a ruin. Yet so much left that isn’t ruined. That face would be worth a lot to me for the ‘Poet’s Cycle of the Months’ that I’m painting now. What a _November_ she’d make; ‘November, the withered mourner of glories dead and gone.’ Only I suppose she’d resent being asked to sit.”

“Illusions are the last assets that a woman loses,” agreed Dr. Strong.

“To think,” pursued the painter, “of what her Maker meant her to be, and of how she has belied it! She’s essentially and fundamentally a beautiful woman; that is why I want her for a model.”

‘“In the structure of her face, perhaps—”

“Yes; and all through. Look at the set of her shoulders, and the lines of her when she walks. Nothing jerry-built about her! She’s got the contours of a goddess and the finish of a mud-pie. It’s maddening.”

“More maddening from the physician’s point of view than from the artist’s. For the physician knows how needless it all is.”

“Is she your patient?”

“If she were I’d be ashamed to admit it. Give me military authority and a year’s time and if I couldn’t fix her so that she’d be proud to pose for your picture—Good Heavens!”

From behind the drapery of the passageway appeared Louise Ennis. She took two steps toward the two men and threw out her hands in an appeal which was almost grotesque.

“Is it true?” she cried, turning from one to the other. “Tell me, is it really true?”

“My dear young lady,” groaned Taylor, “what can I say to palliate my unpard—”

“Nevermind that! I don’t care. I don’t care anything about it. It’s my own fault. I stopped and listened. I couldn’t help it. It means so much to me. You can’t know. No man can understand. Is it true that I—that my face—”

Oren Taylor was an artist in more than his art: he possessed the rare sense of the fit thing to do and say.

“It is true,” he answered quietly, “that I have seen few faces more justly and beautifully modeled than yours.”

“And you,” she said, whirling upon Dr. Strong. “Can you do what you said? Can you make me good-looking?”

“Not I. But you yourself can.”

“Oh, how? What must I do? D—d—don’t think me a fool!” She was half-sobbing now. “It may be silly to long so bitterly to be beautiful. But I’d give anything short of life for it.”

“Not silly at all,” returned Dr. Strong emphatically. “On the contrary, that desire is rooted in the profoundest depths of sex.”

“And is the best excuse for art as a profession,” said the painter, smiling.

“Only tell me what to do,” she besought. “Gently,” said Dr. Strong. “It can’t be done in a day. And it will be a costly process.”

“That doesn’t matter. If money is all—”

“It isn’t all. It’s only a drop in the bucket. It will cost you dear in comfort, in indulgence, in ease, in enjoyment, in habit—”

“I’ll obey like a child.” Again her hands went tremulously out to him; then she covered her face with them and burst into the tears of nervous exhaustion.

“This is no place for me,” said the artist, and was about to escape by the door, when Mrs. Clyde blocked his departure.

“Ah, you are in here,” she said gayly. “I’d been wondering—Why, what’s the matter? What is it?”

“There has been an unfortunate blunder,” said Dr. Strong quickly. “I said some foolish things which Miss Ennis overheard—”

“No,” interrupted the painter. “The fault was mine—” And in the same breath Louise Ennis cried:—

“I didn’t overhear! I listened. I eavesdropped.”

“Are you quite mad, all of you?” demanded the hostess. “Won’t somebody tell me what has happened?”

“It’s true,” said the girl wildly; “every word they said. I _am_ a mess.”

Mrs. Clyde’s arms went around the girl. Sex-loyalty raised its war signal flaring in her cheeks.

“_Who_ said that?” she demanded, in a tone of which Dr. Strong observed afterward, “I never before heard a woman roar under her breath.”

“Never mind who said it,” retorted the girl. “It’s true anyway. It wasn’t meant to hurt me. It didn’t hurt me. He is going to cure me; Dr. Strong is.”

“Cure you, Louise? Of what?”

“Of ugliness. Of hideousness. Of being a mess.”

“But, my dear,” said the older woman softly, “you mustn’t take it to heart so, the idle word of some one who doesn’t know you at all.”

“You can’t understand,” retorted the other passionately. “You’ve always been pretty!”

“A compliment straight from the heart,” murmured the painter.

The color came into Mrs. Clyde’s smooth cheek again. “What have you promised her, Dr. Strong?” she asked.

“Nothing. I have simply followed Mr. Taylor’s lead. His is the artist eye that can see beauty beneath disguises. He has told Miss Ennis that she was meant to be a beautiful woman. I have told her that she can be what she was meant to be if she wills, and wills hard enough.”

“And you will take charge of her case?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“That, of course, depends upon you and Mr. Clyde. If you will include Miss Ennis in the family, my responsibilities will automatically extend to her.”

“Most certainly,” said Mrs. Clyde. “And now, Mr. Taylor,” she added, answering a look of appeal from that uncomfortable gentleman, “come and see the sketches. I really believe they are Whistler’s.”

As they left, Dr. Strong looked down at Louise Ennis with a smile.

“At present I prescribe a little cold water for those eyes,” said he. “And then some general conversation in the drawing-room. Come here tomorrow at four.”

“No,” said she. “I want to begin at once.”

“So as to profit by the impetus of the first enthusiasm? Very well. How did you come here this evening?”

“In my limousine.”

“Sell it.”

“Sell my new car? At this time of year?”

“Store it, then.”

“And go about on street-cars, I suppose?”

“Not at all. Walk.”

“But when it rains?”

“Run.”

Eagerness died out of Louise Ennis’s face. “Oh, I know,” she said pettishly. “It’s that old, old exercise treatment. Well, I’ve tried that, and if you think—”

She stopped in surprise, for Dr. Strong, walking over to the door, held the portière aside.

“After you,” he said courteously.

“Is that all the advice you have for me?” she persisted.

“After you,” he repeated.

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said sulkily. “What is it you want me—”

“Pardon me,” he interrupted in uncompromising tones. “I am sure they are waiting for us in the other room.”

“You are treating me like a spoiled child,” declared Miss Ennis, stamping a period to the charge with her high French heel.

“Precisely.”

She marched out of the room, and, with the physician, joined the rest of the company. For the remainder of the evening she spoke little to any one and not at all to Dr. Strong. But when she came to say good-night he was standing apart. He held out his hand, which she could not well avoid seeing.

“When you get up to-morrow,” he said, “look in the mirror, [she winced] and say, ‘I can be beautiful if I want to hard enough.’ Good-bye.”

Luncheon at the Clydes’ next day was given up to a family discussion of Miss Louise Ennis, precipitated by Mr. Clyde, who rallied Dr. Strong on his newest departure.

“Turned beauty doctor, have you?” he taunted good-humoredly.

“Trainer, rather,” answered Dr. Strong.

“You might be in better business,” declared Mrs. Sharpless, with her customary frankness. “Beauty is only skin-deep.”

“Grandma Sharpless’s quotations,” remarked Dr. Strong to the saltcellar, “are almost as sure to be wrong as her observations are to be right.”

“It was a wiser man than you or I who spoke that truth about beauty.”

“Nonsense! Beauty only skin-deep, indeed! It’s liver-deep anyway. Often it’s soul-deep. Do you think you’ve kept your good looks, Grandma Sharpless, just by washing your skin?”

“Don’t you try to dodge the issue by flattery, young man,” said the old lady, the more brusquely in that she could see her son-in-law grinning boyishly at the mounting color in her face. “I’m as the Lord made me.”

“And as you’ve kept yourself, by clean, sound living. Miss Ennis isn’t as the Lord made her or meant her. She’s a mere parody of it. Her basic trouble is an ailment much more prevalent among intelligent people than they are willing to admit. In the books it is listed under various kinds of hyphenated neurosis; but it’s real name is fool-in-the-head.”

“Curable?” inquired Mr. Clyde solicitously.

“There’s no known specific except removing the seat of the trouble with an axe,” announced Dr. Strong. “But cases sometimes respond to less heroic treatment.”

“Not this case, I fear,” put in Mrs. Clyde. “Louise will coddle herself into the idea that you have grossly insulted her. She won’t come back.”

“Won’t she!” exclaimed Mrs. Sharpless. “Insult or no insult, she would come to the bait that Dr. Strong has thrown her if she had to crawl on her knees.”

Come she did, prompt to the hour. From out the blustery February day she lopped into the physician’s pleasant study, slumped into a chair, and held out to him a limp left hand, palm up and fingers curled. Ordinarily the most punctilious of men, Dr. Strong did not move from his stance before the fire. He looked at the hand.

“What’s that for?” he inquired.

“Aren’t you going to feel my pulse?”

“No.”

“Nor take my temperature?”

“No.”

“Nor look at my tongue?”

“Certainly not. I have a quite sufficient idea of what it looks like.”

The tone was almost brutal. Miss Ennis began to whimper.

“I’m a m—m—mess, I know,” she blubbered. “But you needn’t keep telling me so.”

“A mess can be cleared up,” said he more kindly, “under orders.”

“I’ll do whatever you tell me, if only—”

“Stop! There will be no ‘if’ about it. You will do as you are bid, or we will drop the case right here.”

“No, no! Don’t drop me. I will. I promise. Only, please tell me what is the matter with me.”

Dr. Strong, smiling inwardly, recalled the diagnosis he had announced to the Clydes, but did not repeat it.

“Nothing,” he said.

“But I know there must be. I have such strange symptoms. You can’t imagine.”

Fumbling in her hand-bag she produced a very elegant little notebook with a gold pencil attached. Dr. Strong looked at it with fascinated but ominous eyes.

“I’ve jotted down some of the symptoms here,” she continued, “just as they occurred. You see, here’s Thursday. That was a heart attack—”

“Let me see that book.”

She handed it to him. He carefully took the gold pencil from its socket and returned it to her.

“Now, is there anything in this but symptoms? Any addresses that you want to keep?”

“Only one: the address of a freckle and blemish remover.”

“We’ll come to that later. Meantime—” He tossed the book into the heart of the coal fire where it promptly curled up and perished.

“Why—why—why—” gasped the visitor,—“how dare you? What do you mean? That is an ivory-bound, gold-mounted book. It’s valuable.”

“I told you, I believe, that the treatment would be expensive. This is only the beginning. Of all outrageous, unforgivable kinds of self-coddling, the hypochondria that keeps its own autobiography is the worst.”

Regrettable though it is to chronicle, Miss Ennis hereupon emitted a semi-yelp of rage and beat the floor with her high French heels. Instantly the doctor’s gaze shifted to her feet. Just how it happened she could not remember, but her right foot, unprotected, presently hit the floor with a painful thump, while the physician contemplated the shoe which he had deftly removed therefrom.

“Two inches and a half at least, that heel,” he observed. “Talk about the Chinese women torturing their feet!” He laid the offending article upon the hearth, set his own soundly shod foot upon it, and tweaked off two inches of heel with the fire-tongs. “Not so pretty,” he remarked, “but at least you can walk, and not tittup in that. Give me the other.”

Shocked and astounded into helplessness, she mechanically obeyed. He performed his rough-and-ready repairs, and handed it back to her.

“Speaking of walking,” he said calmly, “have you stored your automobile yet?”

“No! I—I—I—”

“After to-morrow I don’t want you to set foot in it. Now, then, we’re going to put you through a course of questioning. Ready?”

Miss Ennis settled back in her chair, with the anticipatory expression of one to whom the recital of her own woe is a lingering pleasure. “Perhaps if I told you,” she began, “just how I feel—”

“Never mind that. Do you drink?”

“No!” The answer came back on the rebound. “Humph!” Dr. Strong leaned over her. She turned her head away.

“You asked me as if you meant I was a drunkard,” she complained. “Once in a while, when I have some severe nervous strain to undergo, I need a stimulant.”

“Oh. Cocktail?”

“Yes. A mild one.”

“A mild cocktail! That’s a paradox I’ve never encountered. How often do you take these mild cocktails?”

“Oh, just occasionally.”

“Well, a meal is an occasion. Before meals?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted reluctantly.

“You didn’t have one here last night.”

“No.”

“And you ate almost nothing.”

“That is just it, you see. I need something: otherwise I have no appetite.”

“In other words, you have formed a drink habit.”

“Oh, Dr. Strong!” It was half reproach, half insulted innocence, that wail.