“I know, I know.”

“You was saying you have some of your wife’s clothes. I wish to God I had some of Hermann’s. But my little girl sold them all as soon as he was gone.”

“We can’t expect children to understand these things.”

There was a long pause. I had put the flowers in a jar and thought to take them in to Mamma, but as I approached the door, I was urged by a powerful curiosity to know what was taking place in the bedroom, and I crept along the wall to peer between the hinges of the door. The doctor was bent forward, his hands palm upward lying on the counterpane. Their skin was even darker than his face and the nails were a corpse-white. The fingers were short and swollen, the skin stretched so tight it seemed about to split like the skin of a sausage as it is being cooked. These clean, brassy hands played the supernumeraries in the drama of the eyes and lips, and as I watched, they curled into cups as slowly as a flower closes. Then the thumbs moved over the nails of the index fingers with voluptuous deliberation as though the contact with the smooth surface were exquisite. The left hand was raised. The man carried the source of the sensation to his mouth, passed the nail several times over the sensitive area under his lower lip.

My mother’s eyes were cast down but her lashes coquettishly flickered. Her fancy-work lay at her side. The doctor wiped his shining lips with a purple handkerchief (This evening he was dressed in a gray suit and his accessories were purple. He smelled, as well, of lavender water.) as if he had been eating the face before him and its flavor had been so delicious that in his gorging he had been too enthusiastic to mind his lips. But he was not making love. In a moment, although he whispered it, he said, “Let me listen again to that right lung.” I saw him push her nightdress down and explore her breast with his stethoscope, his head bent down so low he seemed to strain not to lay his face on her naked flesh. “Oh, that’s so-so,” he said with a laugh. “I must keep you here another week,” and gazing, deeply stricken, into her eyes, he took her pulse and announced, as if it were a declaration of love, that it was still a little rapid. My mother made no response, but picked up her embroidery hoops across which, this time, was stretched a branch of honeysuckle to which a deformed humming-bird was paying a visit. Dr. Galbraith glanced down and cried, “Charming! How I would like to have some of those things in my house! Would you . . . could I . . . my dear Mrs. Marburg, would you do some table runners for me?”

“Just at present I’m rather busy,” said my mother. “But perhaps I could do a few later.”