"We don't know. Doctors despise surgery; send 'em to the filthy barber surgeons, and they die. I no longer send anyone to the barbers, Reuben. If surgery can't be avoided I stumble through it myself, trying to follow the methods you'll read in that book of Paré's, with these grim little tools--that's splendid steel, by the way, I care for 'em like an old housewife--and I've lost very few under the knife, but I can't tell you why. Why, maybe they're so bemused by the wig that they stay alive so to have another look at it...." At other times it was scarcely possible to drive the lesson home at all. Then in partial retreat from the unbearable he permitted the dream of Ben's return--telling over this complex year as it might be told to him, polishing those whimsical or naughty inventions that used to be rewarded by the startled stare of his gray eyes and his rocketing laughter. Reuben knew such fantasy to be a drug, but yielded in times of need. "You see, Ben, not to put too sharp a point on it when likely it was dull----" No no! Not that way, seeing he may have truly loved her. "You see, Ben, doubtless because their fortunes went down with ours, Captain Jenks being lost or presumed lost--why, she married. Some ancient December blossom"--revise!--"some man named Hoskison, a merchant of Salem where she now liveth, but her mother and Charity dwell with the mother's brother at Dorchester, the said Charity being a most sweet maid, little Benjamin, and greatly changed, who hath not forgotten thee." And so she is, he thought, strolling sure-footed away from the beech in the deep quiet of the mist--so she is; and he wondered in passing whether any self ever lived that was not divided by contrary hungers. Occasionally with Charity--when she sat close by him, or pushed at his chest with friendly impatience, or rubbed her cheek on his shoulder in her impulsive way that was half child, half woman--occasionally Reuben could be reminded of those needs the world allows. Never enough, he thought; never complete; never the sure and hearty answer that Ben, for example, would have known. And never, in fact, quite free from a sense of the pressure of the world, of the command to conform and be like all others; and since to yield to that nagging, to conform and be like others at whatever sacrifice, is to lose oneself in the meanest of all vanities begotten of fear, it is not acceptable to the lonely.