Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/398

 and powdered and dressed, he talked to her as one who was afraid of her. Their bond was their resemblance as brother and sister. They decided, almost irritably, that they looked utterly alike, except that her hair was more patent-leather than his and she lacked his impertinent, cocking eyebrow.

Often Martin returned to his patients at night, but once or twice Mrs. Lanyon and he fled, as much from the family stolidity of the Twyfords as from the thought of fever-scorched patients, to the shore of a rocky lagoon which cut far in from the sea.

They sat on a cliff, full of the sound of the healing tide. His brain was hectic with the memory of charts on the whitewashed broad planks of the almshouse, the sun cracks in the wall, the puffy terrified faces of black patients, how one of the Twyford sons had knocked over an ampule of phage, and how itchingly hot it had been in the ward. But to his intensity the lagoon breeze was cooling, and cooling the rustling tide. He perceived that Mrs. Lanyon's white frock was fluttering about her knees; he realized that she too was strained and still. He turned somberly toward her, and she cried:

"I'm so frightened, and so lonely! The Twyfords are heroic, but they're stone. I'm so marooned!"

He kissed her, and she rested against his shoulder. The softness of her sleeve was agitating to his hand. But she broke away with:

"No! You don't really care a hang about me. Just curious. Perhaps that's a good thing for me—to-night."

He tried to assure her, to assure himself, that he did care with peculiar violence, but languor was over him; between him and her fragrance were the hospital cots, a great weariness, and the still face of Leora. They were silent together, and when his hand crept to hers they sat unimpassioned, comprehending, free to talk of what they would.

He stood outside her door, when they had returned to the house, and imagined her soft moving within.

"No," he raged. "Can't do it. Joyce—women like her—one of the million things I've given up for work and for Lee. Well. That's all there is to it then. But if I were here two weeks— Fool! She'd be furious if you knocked! But—"

He was aware of the dagger of light under her door; the more aware of it as he turned his back and tramped to his room.