“You’re going to play some golf this afternoon,
David,” he said firmly. “Mike had
me out this morning to look at your buggy springs.”
David chuckled. He still stuck to his old horse,
and to the ancient vehicle which had been the signal
of distress before so many doors for forty years.
“I can trust old Nettie,” he would say.
“She doesn’t freeze her radiator on cold
nights, she doesn’t skid, and if I drop asleep
she’ll take me home and into my own barn, which
is more than any automobile would do.”
“I’m going to sleep,” he said comfortably.
“Get Wallie Sayre—I see he’s
back from some place again—or ask a nice
girl. Ask Elizabeth Wheeler. I don’t
think Lucy here expects to be the only woman in your
life.”
Dick stared into the windshield.
“I’ve been wondering about that, David,”
he said, “just how much right—”
“Balderdash!” David snorted. “Don’t
get any fool notion in your head.”
Followed a short silence with Dick driving automatically
and thinking. Finally he drew a long breath.
“All right,” he said, “how about
that golf—you need exercise. You’re
putting on weight, and you know it. And you smoke
too much. It’s either less tobacco or more
walking, and you ought to know it.”
David grunted, but he turned to Lucy Crosby, in the
rear seat:
“Lucy, d’you know where my clubs are?”
“You loaned them to Jim Wheeler last fall.
If you get three of them back you’re lucky.”
Mrs. Crosby’s voice was faintly tart. Long
ago she had learned that her brother’s belongings
were his only by right of purchase, and were by way
of being community property. When, early in
her widowhood and her return to his home, she had
found that her protests resulted only in a sort of
clandestine giving or lending, she had exacted a promise
from him. “I ask only one thing, David,”
she had said. “Tell me where the things
go. There wasn’t a blanket for the guest-room
bed at the time of the Diocesan Convention.”
“I’ll run around to the Wheelers’
and get them,” Dick observed, in a carefully
casual voice. “I’ll see the Carter
baby, too, David, and that clears the afternoon.
Any message?”
Lucy glanced at him, but David moved toward the house.
“Give Elizabeth a kiss for me,” he called
over his shoulder, and went chuckling up the path.
Mrs. Crosby stood on the pavement, gazing after the
car as it moved off. She had not her brother’s
simplicity nor his optimism. Her married years
had taken her away from the environment which had
enabled him to live his busy, uncomplicated life; where,
the only medical man in a growing community, he had
learned to form his own sturdy decisions and then
to abide by them.
Black and white, right and wrong, the proper course
and the improper course—he lived in a sort
of two-dimensional ethical world. But to Lucy
Crosby, between black and white there was a gray no-man’s
land of doubt and indecision; a half-way house of compromise,
and sometimes David frightened her. He was so
sure.
