“But it was me who visited him in the pen,” Vance spoke like one defending himself. “Who else went there week after week, far as it is from here . . . And he never appreciated it! . . . All he ever asked about was Gareth Vaisey.” (Gareth was a neighbor boy who had been in a serious auto wreck about the time of Sidney’s trouble.)

“But, Vance, see it’s you he has come home to! . . . He didn’t come home to Gareth after all. . . .”

Vance quieted down. Dr. Ulric had that ability to calm one, not so much by what he said, he said very little, but by reason of his being himself so quiet. Then he had delivered most of the babies for twenty-­five miles around and perhaps the two speakers remembered at this moment ever so fleetingly that the doctor had delivered both Sidney and Vance. He was after all considerably closer to many of his patients than a father. Too close, the doctor often thought. Hence perhaps his insomnia.

“I’m too close to everybody,” Dr. Ulric had once said in a loud voice when he had had a glass too many of the huckle­berry wine which he manufactured himself down in the basement.

As he neared seventy Dr. Ulric’s face began to set in a certain way so that it resembled a door that has been nailed shut in a deserted house. His eyes were as bright as ever, perhaps brighter, the disc of the pupil appearing to move like a white fire, but his face in general gave the impression of belonging to someone who never expected anything again. His present was taken up with tasks which he held onto like a drowning man will to the sight of shore. Yes, his patients were as needful to him as air, and his ministrations were therefore not duty but necessity. And though his hands trembled too badly for him to deliver babies (it was his skill as an obstetrician which had given him his greatest reputation), he toiled from early to late with the sick and the discouraged.

He had leased out the many acres of fields surrounding his house to farmers to grow corn on. There was something about the sight of the corn—in the summer growing taller and heavier and then the gold sheaves in the fall and winter—which was nearly as important to him as his patients.

Sometimes in mid-­August he would walk out at some considerable distance into the cornfields and appear to be listening to the moving stalks.