Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/169

 his country practice, a changed man. Something had happened to dash his youthful spirits, to kill his ambition, yet at the same time to harden and fix his character in new lines. It was not an unhappy love affair. None knew better than Jane Bennett that there was but one girl whom Anson had ever given a thought to, and she believed that that girl, the pretty Alice Ives, might have been his for the asking, long before she ever thought of marrying George Titcomb and going to live in Boston. No, if his love affair had ended disastrously, Anson had no one to thank for it but himself. Yet as he had deserted his new career in the full tide of success, Mrs. Bennett naturally found it impossible to credit his unvarnished statement that he had "made a botch of doctoring," and for that reason had come back to his old home and to his father's counter.

"You needn't talk to me," she had said over and over again to her meek good-humored spouse. "You needn't talk to me about Anson's not being a good doctor. 'T ain't likely he'd ha' made such a success of it if he hadn't had the faculty. Why! Deacon Osgood says that his cousin on his mother's side, who lives jest out o' East Burnham, says they never was a doctor in those parts that everybody set such store by as Anson. That old fogy Dr. Morse hadn't any show at all, long's Anson stayed there. There's something more at the bottom of it, you may depend upon it. I declare to goodness! when I see Anson moping