Mrs. Preston took one of his furry hands in hers, and pressed it. She knew that the ventures had not yet made him rich. Thirty years in Chicago had not filled his purse. "I'd do it for you, same as for one of my daughters. It's just as easy as having a tooth out, and you start over as good as new." "It isn't that," she smiled. "You can't start over as good as new if you are a woman. I couldn't run away. I've put myself into it a second time, without thinking. I chose then just as before, when I followed him to the hospital. When the doctor asked me if he should try to save his life, I wanted him to die--oh, how I longed that the doctor would refuse to try! Well, he's alive. It is for life." She seemed to see before her a long, toilsome ascent, to which she had been driven to put her feet. "Think it over," the dentist counselled at last, despondently. "Sleep on it. There's Worcester, Ohio, and my sister-in-law." Mrs. Preston smiled, and put on her hat. "I've taken a lot of your time." "That's no account, but I can't see what you came for. You won't let a feller help you." "There wasn't any good reason. I came because I was awfully lonely. There isn't a soul that I can speak out to, except you. You don't know what that means. I go about in the schoolroom, and up and down the streets, and see things--horrible things. The world gets to be one big torture chamber, and then I have to cry out. I come to you to cry out,--because you really care. Now I can go away, and keep silent for a long time." "You make too much of it," the dentist protested. He busied himself in putting the little steel instruments into their purple plush beds and locking the drawers. "Yes, I make too much of it," Mrs. Preston acknowledged quietly, as she opened the door. "Good night." "I guess she loves him still and don't like to own it. Women are generally so," the dentist commented, when he was left alone. He picked up a sheaf of stock certificates and eyed them critically. "They're nicer than the Placer Mining ones. They just look fit to eat." He locked the certificates of stock in the new company into a tiny safe, and prepared to pull down the shade. In the railroad yards below, the great eyes of the locomotives glared though the March dusk. As the suburban trains pulled out from minute to minute, thick wreaths of smoke shot up above the white steam blasts of the surrounding buildings. The smoke and steam were sucked together into the vortex of a cross street. 'I wished I hadn't let her go alone,' the dentist mused. 'Some day she'll just go over there into the lake.'