She had cleaned it up. The desk had been swept clean of the clutter and dusted, the typewriter was covered for the first time in years. My books were stacked in two neat piles and the mail laid beside them.
The seven separate stacks of manuscript were now one stack, held down by a paperweight. Each of the seven pages that had been atop the stacks bore dusty finger smudges; she had read the manuscript. She had also swept the floor. I remembered seeing the broom outside in the corridor. The janitor was never as ambitious as all that.
Going around behind the desk, I found your violin case (and now my letter file) and her purse lying in the swivel chair. She must have forgotten the purse. It was then that I noticed her card.
It was perched between two rows of typewriter keys, just peeping from beneath the dust cover, and it read:
Two of her cigarette stubs bearing lipstick were in the ash tray.
While I was looking at them I heard the furniture men leave her office and clump down the stairs. They said something funny to someone else at the foot of the stairs, someone who was banging on the wall with a hammer. A carpenter, hanging her shingle. Everybody laughed.
I sat down in the swivel chair and did nothing for half an hour; at first I even tried to stop thinking, without notable success.
After a while her office door opened and shut, and her footsteps came across the corridor to my door. Her image showed fuzzy and green on the frosted glass. She walked in. She had removed the smock and was wearing a light green business suit that befitted a lovely woman more than a doctor.
I suppose my face said as much; she smiled self-consciously. I discovered I was holding her purse, and passed it across the desk to her. She took a chair opposite me.
“All ready for my first patient!” she exclaimed brightly. “I wonder who it will be?”
“Haven’t you been practicing? In Chicago?”
“No. Laboratory work ever since I graduated. I got tired of it. And you must admit there is still a doctor shortage. Especially here. That’s why I chose Boone. I like small towns.”
“It isn’t so small.”
“I’m from Chicago, remember?”
I shrugged. Not being a chamber of commerce booster I didn’t really give a damn what she thought of it. I knew what my trouble was. I was beginning to like Elizabeth Saari and yet I knew too little about her. Sitting there for half an hour, doing nothing but thinking, turning a thousand points over in my mind, I wound up with a disquieting mental attitude. It was like a witch’s spell cast over me. I didn’t want to break it by conversation; yet I hardly cared to be ridden by it the rest of the day.
In short, I was feeling low-down and mean.
She didn’t help a bit, “So you paid for the funeral?”
I nodded wearily. So we were back to that again. If she continued along that line I’d begin to wish I hadn’t, just to be perverse about it.
“Why?” she insisted.
“Maybe I have a humble heart,” I said with heavy sarcasm.
“You’re not being civil, Chuck. Won’t you give me a worthwhile explanation?”
Sourly, “Why the hell should I?”
She instantly changed inside. “I’m sorry to have asked,” she retorted stiffly, and made as if to leave. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
I jumped to my feet. “Please, Elizabeth...”
She paused, still not looking at me.
“Please sit down. I apologize; let’s not fight about it.” She turned back to the chair and I rushed on. “I’m feeling rotten, that’s all. My morale has just about hit bottom. I didn’t think any girl could upset me like this.”
She sat down and fumbled in her purse for a package of cigarettes. Lighting two, she held one across the desk to me, smiling gravely. I mumbled thanks.
“I should make the apologies,” she contradicted. “I realize, now, that I’ve been prying into things that don’t concern me. From your point of view, that is. My curiosity overcame my manners. As I mentioned last night, I think you’re a nice boy. I know you are capable of doing a lot of nice things for people; but I couldn’t quite understand this.”
“You’ve nothing on me; I can’t either. Softness, I guess. For no logical reason, I wanted to do something for that doll. I did the only thing I could find to do.”
“Do you mind if... I talk about it? Just a little bit?”
I said no, go right ahead.
“It may be softness, Chuck, and then again it may not. I don’t think you are a push-over for a pretty face. You saw a girl on ice skates, you liked her appearance, and when you found her on the undertaking table the next day it did something to you, inside. That’s understandable. Furthermore, when you discovered she was to be buried...”
Elizabeth suddenly stopped like a gramophone needle taken off the record. Or like someone who had suddenly fallen over a new and startling idea and didn’t know what to do next. Her brown eyes grew very large and round. They searched a face I was careful to keep blank. I knew the idea she had stumbled over.
“Chuck,” she queried softly, “you had met that girl
