“No, she shouldn’t.” He laughed. “Be sure you don’t give her very hot tea or the thermometer will break into smithereens and you’ll have to buy a new one. Good-by! I’ll drop around in four or five days. In the meantime, just follow my directions.”

When even her authentic abnormal temperatures had subsided and her cough had gone almost entirely and by her color and her returning flesh I knew that she was nearly well, the doctor still did not discontinue his visits. He came only in the evenings, and sometimes called for me at the Brunsons’ to drive me home, a courtesy that never suited me since he was not the kind of man who could inspire young people to chatter, and if he asked a question, the answer was always too simple, and I would reply in a monosyllable. He would inquire, for instance, if I liked Latin, and because, in his voice, Latin acquired a colossal unimportance, I could say no more than “Yes” or “No,” depending on how well I had translated that day. A gluttonous boredom resided in him and its appetite was insatiable. He might look at the full moon whose reflection floated on the dark blue water and he would sigh with a vast ennui. Occasionally, he exhaled the piney odor of gin and at these times he was more animated, but he looked at me so lecherously and his talk tottered so perilously on the brink of obscenity, that I preferred his other mood. “I bet you’re the kind of girl that keeps the boys at arm’s length, aren’t you?” Or, “What do you young people do after the picture show? You don’t go home and you don’t study. Or do you study nature, that is, human nature down at the Point?”

Some people, among them the charitable but mawkish Gonzales, declared that Dr. Galbraith had only taken to drink after his wife’s death. But others, like the Hendersons, said he had always “gone pretty heavy on the bottle.” He was known to have women just as he was known to be a drunkard, but he took great pains never to be seen in the company of the women and never to be seen drinking. Thus, his depravity, never demonstrated as sordid, was surrounded by an appealing aura and no one identified so dapper a “professional man” with a “drunk” or visualized him with a fancy woman. Through a wonderful stroke of luck for him, the old ladies at the Hotel knew nothing of his reputation as a voluptuary, and if they had been told that his eccentric color came from jaundice which had been brought on by many years of copious, solitary drinking, they would have said confidently, “Oh, you’re quite mistaken. He goes every year to Florida and somehow manages to keep his tan twelve months at a time.”