"Yes, I know. I suppose the truth is that life doesn't seem to me to be worth all the fuss they make over it. The more they suffer, the harder they appear to cling to living. I believe in facing what you have to face and making as little fuss about it as possible." "I've noticed that. You hate fussiness." She assented gravely. "When you've been very poor, you realize that it is the greatest extravagance." "You've been very poor, then?" "Almost everybody is poor at Pedlar's Mill. The Ellgoods are the only people who have prospered. The rest of us have had to wring whatever we've had out of barren ground. It was a struggle to make anything grow." "Well, your face gives you away," he said thoughtfully. "Any nerve specialist could tell you that you are made up of contradictions. You've got the most romantic eyes I ever saw--they are as deep as an autumn twilight--and the sternest mouth. Your eyes are gentle and your mouth is hard--too hard, if you don't mind my saying so." "Oh, I don't mind. People say we make our mouths. I heard Doctor Faraday tell a woman that a few days ago. But it isn't true. Life makes us and breaks us. We don't make life. The best we can do is to bear it." "And you do that jolly well." She did not smile as she answered. "Oh, I'm satisfied. I'm not unhappy--except in spots," she corrected herself. "Yet you have very little pleasure. You never go out." "Yes, I do--sometimes. Every now and then Mrs. Faraday takes me to the theatre." "Do you ever go to hear music?" "No, Mrs. Faraday doesn't care for it." She laughed. "The best I've ever heard was a band in the street." For an instant he hesitated, and she wondered what was coming. Then he said persuasively: "There's a good concert to-morrow. Would you care to come?" She glanced at him inquiringly. "Sunday afternoon?" "Yes, there's this new pianist, Krause. You aren't too pious, are you?" "I'm not pious at all." A satirical memory sifted through her mind, and she heard her own voice saying, "Will you let her die without giving her time to prepare?" "Then I'll come for you at half-past two. We'll hear the concert, and then have tea somewhere, or a stroll in the Park." When he had gone, she put the office in order, and then waited until the last patient should leave. After all, why shouldn't she try to find some pleasure in life? Her hesitation had come, she felt, from a nervous avoidance of crowds, a shrinking from any change in her secluded manner of living. She hummed a line from one of the Gospel hymns. "Rescue the perishing, care for the dying." "How ignorant he will think me when he discovers I have never heard any music. I am ignorant, yet I am educated compared to what I was two years ago. I know life now, and that is a great deal." The patient came out and left, and in a few minutes Doctor Faraday passed through the room on his way to put on his overcoat.