“There’s the very point I’m making,” her husband said. “Two weeks ago we’d both have thought it was the last thing in the world she’d consent to do, and this evening we didn’t even suggest it to her; she went of her own volition, and cheerfully, too! I ask you if that doesn’t show she’s a different creature. And isn’t it better for two to suffer than three?” “I ask _you_,” she returned, sharply: “How short sighted are you? We’re giving her a recess from pain, yes; but what are we thrusting her into? When she does see him as he is, and finds herself bound to him for life, isn’t she going to turn to us then, when it’s too late, and say: ‘Why didn’t you save me?’” “Oh, Lord!” the father groaned, and his gesture was that of a man who has tried to make the best of his misery, but abandons the effort. “I don’t know! I can’t see! When you put it like that, I don’t know whether we’re doing right or wrong.” He paced the library floor, walking heavily, his head down. “It’s a miserable thing any way you look at it,” he said. “I did have just one slight alleviation: it seemed to me I bore it a little better, having him at the dinner-table this week, than I did the week before. It seemed to me maybe it might be because I was getting to like him a little, perhaps.” “No,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “It was because he was here five times the first week and only three the second.” “Is that so?” He stopped his pacing and stood still. “So she asked him five times the first week and only three the second. Doesn’t that look as if maybe——” “No, I’m afraid not,” his wife interrupted, unhesitatingly destroying this obscure germ of hope. “When you give a child a toy it’ll play with it more at first than it will later. That doesn’t mean the child won’t cry if you try to take the toy away, does it?” “No, I suppose not.” He had relapsed into gloom again. “And I suppose my poor little alleviation was——” “Your ‘alleviation,’” Mrs. Dodge informed him, “was in the diminished number of the acute attacks—three instead of five—and not because you began to feel any affection for the disease itself.” “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “And I’m afraid you’ve found the correct definition for what afflicts us.” He sank into a chair, unhappily limp and relaxed, his arms hanging flaccidly over the arms of the chair. “Crabbe Osborne is our disease,” he said. “It’s a disease the more awful because when a child gets it the parents get it, too, and when they give the child an opiate they only stop her pain for a little while; and then the child and the parents, all three of ’em, have got to have the disease for the rest of their lives! And the greatest mystery of it all is that an absolutely chance boy, with no malice, no harm in him—a mere drifting bit of flesh and nothing, that we’d never heard of a year ago—that a meaningless thing like Crabbe Osborne should do all this to us!”