"The trouble is that I can't be with you but a part of the time. There's this worthless practice. I can't give it up, if I'm to keep on in medicine, and yet it means that I must spend half my life jogging over these God-forsaken roads. Then the night!" He shivered with disgust. "If you only knew, and I'm thankful you don't, what it means to be shut up in that house. Some nights my father doesn't sleep at all unless he is drugged into stupor. He wanders about with a horsewhip, looking in every room and closet for something to flog." While he spoke she had a vision of the house, with its dust and cobwebs, and of the drunken old man, in his nightshirt and bare feet, roaming up and down the darkened staircase. She could see his bleared eyes, his purple face, his skinny legs, like the legs of a turkey gobbler, and his hands, as sharp as claws, lashing out with the horsewhip. The picture was so vivid that, coming in the midst of her dreamy happiness, it sickened her. Why did Jason have to stand horrors like that? "It can't last much longer," she said. Was it the right thing, she wondered, or ought she to have kept up the pretence of loving the old man and dreading his death? Life would be so much simpler, she reflected, if people would only build on facts, not on shams. He shook his head. "Nobody can say. Sometimes I think he can't last but a few weeks. Then he improves, without apparent reason, and his strength is amazing. According to everything we know about his condition, he ought to have died months ago; yet he appears to be getting better now instead of worse. I believe it is simply a question of will. He is kept alive by his terror of dying. It's brutal, I know," he added, "to look forward to anybody's death, especially your own father's; but if you only knew how my life is eaten away hour by hour." "You couldn't make some arrangement?" she asked. "Engage somebody to stay with him, or--or send him away?"