" No wonder men fly from home to those other
women," he muttered, with somewhat the blasphemer's
combination of fear and recklessness. " Why, if they
acted like this they wouldn't make their salt."
If he had not quarreled with her that afternoon he
would have risen up and passed the night on the sofa
down in his library. As it was, he stiffened his nerves
and lay quiet. " She's far too good for me, anyway,"
said he to himself. " I'm getting to be a kicker and a
60
"A GOOD WOMAN, BUT'
crank like all idlers. I must go to work again or I don't
know where I'll land."
But these reflections seemed to have no calming effect
upon the odor. " Yes," thought he, " she's a good
woman, but it does seem to me I'd wash at least my
hair now and then, and risk neuralgia. It can't be
much worse than this."
IV
HE waited until her breathing assured him he was
free; then he stealthily rose and went into the dressing
room, softly closing the door between. Wrapped in a
bath robe, and covered with an afghan, he got a few
hours' sleep on the little lounge there near an open win
dow. When she awoke it was nearly nine o'clock ; as
he was very regular she knew he had been gone since half
past seven. We are all surprised to find our troubles
with us after a sleep ; Sophy was not an exception. In
addition to her mental or moral woes there was now a
fierce headache. Also, a sciatic pain was stabbing at her
left side. " He'll be the death of me," she moaned.
" After the life I've led I've not got much endurance
left." She rang for Katy, and said to her: "I
don't want any breakfast. I couldn't swallow a
mouthful."
Katy was prepared for this, and had her habitual
answer ready. " Oh, but you must eat something, Mrs.
Murdock," urged she. " You know it's mighty bad to
begin the day on an empty stomach. I'll just go down
and have the cook fix you up something tempting and
tasty."
" Well, I'll do my best," conceded Sophy, speaking,
and feeling, as if she were doing Katy a favor. " I do
62
MY LIFE'S OVER
believe coffee is bad for me. You might bring me choco
late with a little whipped cream."
" Cream's very nourishing. They've got some nice
sausages very light and small."
" Just one, Katy. And maybe I could eat a few corn
cakes if they're crisp and thin."
While Katy was gone Mrs. Murdock lay motionless,
hoping to allay the throbbing in her head. " Thank
God," said she, " I've got a good digestion. I don't
know what'd become of me if I couldn't eat enough to
keep up my strength."
In her healthy, vigorous girlhood every pleasure of
the senses attracted her. But eating being the only
pleasure that calls for no effort whatever she had now
narrowed down to it, and was in the way to become a
glutton. When Katy appeared with the breakfast tray
she at once felt a little better. The odor from it from
the sausage, the well-browned hot cakes, the chocolate
was most stimulating. She sat up in bed, put
both the pillows behind her. The big oily coil into
which her hair had been done for the night was loose
and hung over one ear, threatening to fall. She took
it down and rerolled it. " I think we'll have to wash
my hair soon, Katy," said she. " It's getting so it'll
hardly stay up. What a trouble long hair is ! Now
put the tray on my lap. Why, you've brought three
sausages."
" There's really nothing to 'em, Mrs. Murdock.
They just melt away. And you mustn't starve yourself,
you know."
Sophy fell to, ate all the sausages, all the cakes, drank
two cups of the chocolate with whipped cream. Katyj
begged to be allowed to bring more. But Sophy re
sisted. " No, I guess I'd better not. It's only three
63
OLD WIVES FOR NEW
hours till lunch, and I think I've taken enough to
stay me."
" And you do feel better, don't you, ma'am? "
" Very much," replied Sophy. " I'll just lie here a
few moments, and then I think I'll be strong enough to
get up and dress."
Katy took away the tray. When she returned Sophy
was groaning. " It's come back ! " she cried. " My head
feels as if it'd burst, and the pain in my heart is fright
ful. I'm afraid I oughtn't to have eaten."
" Oh, you'd have been much worse if you hadn't,
ma'am. Taking a little nourishing food could never do
a body any harm."
" Dr. Schulze says food's poison when the system
isn't in condition to receive it."
" I'm surprised at your paying attention to that
crank," said Katy. " And he's an atheist, too."
" I feel dreadful ! " moaned Sophy. " But it can't
be the breakfast, for my digestion is all right. No, it's
all my my worries. Let me have the hand glass."
" I'll pull down the shades and put hot water on
your head," pleaded the maid.
" The glass first," insisted Sophy.
Katy went into the dressing room for it most re
luctantly, as her mistress was looking her worst. But
Katy was reckoning without the partiality of the hu-
{ man glance when it is bent upon the features that are
the dearest and most attractive in all the world. In
stead of dropping the glass in horror Sophy gazed
long and earnestly. " I do look bad, don't I ? "
said she, in the tone that invites contradiction. But
Katy was silent. " Still, I'm showing that I'm not
well," continued Sophy. " And what wonder that I
ain't."
64
MY LIFE'S OVER
" Yes, indeed with all the work and worry you have,
'am."
Sophy sighed. " You don't know half not half,"
she said with gloomy mystery. " I'm afraid I'll have
to go to old Schulze. I'm a little yellow, and a little
bit flabby." Not very flabby; she could find nothing^
to criticise in the broad expanse of her neck. " And my '
skin," thought she, " is as smooth as it always was. No
body ever did have such a skin." Still, a tonic would do
her good ; then, she'd not take such an absurdly gloomy
view of Charles's silly attempt to defy nature and con
ventionality by trying to go back to youth. " Yes, I
must see Dr. Schulze if I don't feel better in a day or
two."
To Katy she said, " Take the glass away and bring
the hot water. I'll not get up till I feel better. I think I'm
having a chill and my head " She sank back with a
groan " Oh, Katy, how I am suffering ! I'm sure I
oughtn't to have eaten those sausages. Why did you
bring three? I told you not to. Not a word ! You know
you've done wrong. Get the hot water and I'll take
one of those headache powders. Is there a capsicum
plaster in the house? If not, send somebody for one.
No, get two. They come two for a quarter. No matter
how sick I am I never neglect things."
She felt when the headache was quieted somewhat
by the powder she felt that, in a way, this illness was
not inopportune. She could put it to use in bringing
round her wayward husband. With Charley, and Blag-
den, his former chief secretary, whom he had retained
as private secretary, he was about to go away on a shoot
ing trip ; her time was short. Tears he could withstand,
as she had learned early in their married life. Re
proaches and entreaties had no effect, so far as she had
65
OLD WIVES FOR NEW
ever been able to discover. But before illness he was
always soft. She waited in confidence, not leaving her
bedroom, scarcely leaving the bed, neglecting her toilet
even more than usual and her habits were those of the
period preceding the gospel of the daily bath, the time
when people regarded much attention to the intimate
toilet as certainly unnecessary, probably sinful, and
were disposed to interpret personal cleanness as a clean
face and hands and regularity at church, and good
housekeeping as a clean parlor and front stoop and
everybody at family prayers before breakfast.
He suspected fraud in this illness; besides, he felt
he had no responsibility in it. Still, he was gradually
wrought upon by her abject appearance, the softening
process being greatly aided by certain deep-down qualms
of self-reproach for errant thoughts, for private criti
cisms of her appearance and mentality and inertia, criti
cisms the more unkind because true. Also, as she had
been insisting on his occupying the same bed and sleep
ing, if it could be called sleeping, with the bedroom
windows down, he was feeling none too well himself.
When she began to take on that mortal look which
makes so ghastly the faces of the fat though they be
but indisposed and for only a few days, he felt guilty,
remorseful.
On the sixth morning, soon after she had had Katy
prop her up and bring breakfast, he braved again the
close air, the stale, nauseating odors of their bedroom
from which he had hastened at daybreak. " Have you
had the doctor? " he asked abruptly, his tone a shallow
pretense of gruffness, his eyes full of pity and pain.
She turned her face away to conceal her satisfaction.
She shook her head and sighed.
" You must see Schulze."
66
MY LIFE'S OVER
" What does it matter? " she muttered. " Nobody
cares whether I live or die. My life's over."
" Nonsense," said he, seating himself on the bed
and laying his hand upon hers, the more tenderly because
touching her thus brought to him vividly the contrast
ing memory of a time when the sense of her would have
made the blood leap in his veins. " Nonsense Sophy ! "
He happened to glance down at her hand a naturally
beautiful hand it was soft yet firm, slender, delicately
shaped in palm and in fingers. And the nails were thin
and pink and convex. But she had let the dead flesh
grow raggedly up round the base of the nails, and under
the rims they were far, far from clean. He did not drop
her hand immediately; but he did immediately look
away.
" A woman had better die when the bloom of her
youth is gone," she continued mournfully. She glanced
at him ; so low in mind was she that for once his look
of vigorous young manhood, his cleanness and fresh
ness, the attractive way he was dressed, did not rouse
her anger and hatred, but a dreary, resigned hope
lessness. " Men care only for freshness," moaned
she. " Gratitude and duty and respect are only words
to them."
Bloom of youth! His eyes shifted from her di
sheveled, repellant homeliness. As he had imagination,
his heart ached with pity. " Sophy," he said earnestly,
" it's your illness that makes you think these things.
Get well, and you'll be all right again. I'll call Schulze
on the 'phone."
Her silence was assent; she herself was a little
alarmed about her condition, was fearing she had gone
too far in desperate measures to restore him to sense of
her due. He went to the telephone in the dressing room,
67
OLD WIVES FOR NEW
presently to return with : " Schulze wants to know
whether you've had any breakfast."
" No," replied she, adding reproachfully, " how
could I, sick as I am? I just forced down some oatmeal
and cream and a cup of coffee."
Murdock was gone longer. When he reappeared, he
said indignantly : " He won't come. He says you must
come to him."
Her eyes flashed and she sat up in bed energetically.
" Why didn't you tell him how ill I was? "
" I told him you couldn't raise your head off the
pillow." Sophy hastily sank back. " Then," continued
Murdock, in spite of himself less indignantly, " when
I told him what you said about breakfast, he said : ' If
that didn't kill her, it won't hurt her to come to me,'
and he rang off. And when I got his office again his
daughter said he was too busy to come to the 'phone."
Mrs. Murdock's eyes were sparkling. The appalling
yellowish pallor of her skin was overlaid with the red
of anger. " And the worst of it is, we're at the mercy
of that brute ! " she cried. " If he wasn't such a won
derful doctor he'd have been white-capped long ago
tarred and feathered and railed out of town. Here, I
may be dying for all he knows, and he refuses to come ! "
" It's useless to offer him an extra fee."
" Worse than useless," retorted she. " He'd prob
ably refuse to treat me at all."
" We can get another doctor. There's his daughter,
young Mrs. Ranger."
Sophy did not let slip the opportunity to discharge
her anger upon some one less distant and less secure than
Schulze. "What do you take me for? Do you think
I'd let a woman touch me? The women, the good-look
ing ones, can fool you men. But 7 know women. They;
68
MY LIFE'S OVER"
can't learn anything." She collapsed into sullen tears.
" No, I'll risk my life and dress and go to him. The
brute!"
By this time Murdock was seeing that her illness
could not be so serious as he had imagined. " I guess
there's nothing else to be done," said he, concealing his
suspicion under a discreet appearance of deep sympathy.
He noted the overpowering air of the room. " It'll
certainly do her good to get any sort of a change from
this air," he reflected. And he left her, to go to his
affairs downtown, in a chastened but no longer humble
mood ; indeed, he felt somewhat foolish about the exag
geration of remorse that had dominated him a few mo
ments before. " If she'd only eat less and stir about a
little," he said to himself. " First thing she knows she'll
be really sick. Her timidity about fresh water and
fresh air is beginning to get on my nerves." But there
he halted his dangerously frank thoughts; instinct
warned him that in that direction lay truths he must not
face.
SOPHY SEEKS A CONFESSOR
IN the course of an hour Sophy, groaning at every
step but carefully dressed even to the cruelly tight stays
wherewith she deemed it expedient in public to restrain
her amplitude, descended to her victoria, to be driven
to Dr. Schulze's trim little house with its gay German
garden in front and at the side.
She made an astonishingly good appearance as
she sat in her carriage in state, and as she swept
into the sanitarily bare offices. But Sophy was al
ways careful of appearances. None but her own fam
ily, the servants and, occasionally by accident one
of the tradespeople, ever saw her as she was. She took
the only vacant chair in the long line ranged against the
wall of the waiting room ; she noted that, save herself,
the most important person in that motley assembly was
a small grocer. " If I hadn't given him a piece of my
mind and ordered him off the place," she thought, eying
him severely, " he'd offer me his turn. As it is, I've got
to wait. What an outrage ! " But she knew she could
only let her fury consume itself and vanish in its own
steam; one of Schulze's many coarse notions was that
disease and pain were no more severe and no more im
portant in one kind of human being than in another.
Indeed he would admit only two human estates " sick-
70
SOPHY SEEKS A CONFESSOR
ness and health. The rest is either poppycock or tom-
myrot or both."
Like every man of will and intellect who does not
have to conciliate his fellow-citizens in order to make a
living, he was positive in speech and in action, was simple
and direct. He traced all human ills, mental, physical,
moral, economic, political, to the poor health of the over
whelming 1 mass of the human race ; he therefore revered
his profession as above all the others. But, for that
profession as usually practiced and for most of its prac
titioners, he had profound contempt.
" A tough race ! A tough race ! " he used to say.
" It has been preyed upon by the priests and the doctors
from the beginning mind and body. Yet it survives
and has even here and there made some slight progress."
And again : " Medicine is like all the other professions.
It advances only by compulsion from without. The
average doctor resists a new truth about health and
disease, partly because it is an insult to his pretense of
already knowing all, but chiefly because it forces him
to do some thinking." To Schulze the usual doctor
seemed the exact synonym for pretentious ignorance.
" Nothing is simpler than the science of health," he
would say. " It consists in regularity, fresh air, simple
food in small quantities, plenty of exercise. Dosing is
simply an attempt to cure one disease by setting up
another that may be slower, but is usually none the less
deadly." And again : " Nothing better illustrates the
ignorance and the depravity of the medical profession
than the fact that, although all disease originates in
disorder in the digestive apparatus, a doctor's first move
is to make his wretched victim swallow a drug that
will upset the stomach." And again : " The human
body isn't a mystery; it's a machine. The mystery;
71
OLD WIVES FOR NEW
is how it withstands the abuse of its owner and his
doctor."
The first twenty years of his career had been years
of humiliation and poverty because he scorned to practice
his profession as the " black art." The doctor who mys
tifies with hocus-pocus and " cures " with something to
take two or three times a day in a spoon, or as a pill,
appeals at once to the credulity and to the laziness of
his patient, like the priest who sells indulgences. But
the doctor who shows his patient that disease isn't a
visitation of Providence or bad luck, but is the patient's
own mortal assaults upon his own health through eating,
drinking and irregularity, and who orders as medicine a
sane and temperate mode of life, with all the " good
things " cut off such a doctor seems a poor creature, a
crank, to the average laymen, and to the average
" learned practitioner." However, Schulze began by
getting as patients those who " could not afford a better
doctor," performed miracles of cure, gradually made his
way against Saint X's passion for pretense and pref
erence for the darkness of hocus-pocus rather than the
light of unpretending common sense. The theory in
Saint X was that his years of fierce struggle had em
bittered him; in fact, he was not bitter at all, simply
uncompromising and using a gruff manner to protect his
temper and his time against his patients. The attitude
of most laymen toward the physician is precisely that
of the people of the Middle Ages toward their priest
a notion that if they can wheedle him into giving them
easy penance they will be saved just as securely as if
they repented and reformed. Schulze would have none
of this.
Mrs. Murdock had to wait full three quarters of an
hour before her turn came. Instead of a servant to intro-
72
SOPHY SEEKS A CONFESSOR
duce his patients, Schulze had upon the door between
office and waiting room a card which read, " When the
lock clicks, the next in line will please enter." The
spring attachment on the lock was worked from his desk.
At the click Mrs. Murdock, the last in the waiting room,
rustled and groaned into the presence of the ugly little
man with the scarlet button of a nose and the eyes that
were wondrous keen and kind. He was at his desk facing
the door ; a huge Oriental image, its face a ludicrous
yet somehow awe-inspiring caricature of his own,
squatted on a pedestal behind him. The light from the
windows fell full upon the chair opposite him, which
was obviously for the patient.
" So you managed to get here alive," he began, his
tone and manner so sarcastic and so formidable that
Sophy's great desire to rage at him vanished in a greater
desire to conciliate him. Schulze applied to human na
ture the principle of physics that the way to overcome a
force is to meet it with a stronger force from the opposite
direction.
" And that's about all," replied she piteously. " I've
been ill for the past six weeks. There's a pain in
my "
" Put out your tongue," he interrupted.
She put it out. Having thus at a stroke reduced
her to compulsory and undignified silence, he with delib
eration set his glasses on the tip of his buttonlike nose,
threw his head back and, without moving nearer her, in
spected the tongue. " Frightful," he said. " Frightful.
Hide it!"
She drew her tongue in. " I don't wonder," she be
gan again, " when I think of the pain "
" Stop ! " commanded the old man sharply. " The
last time you were here, what did I prescribe? "
6 73
OLD WIVES FOR NEW
Sophy looked miserable. " Two meals a day," she
replied feebly.
"What kind of meals?"
" You said simple meals."
"I did. And what else?"
" I believe you recommended a walk."
" I prescribed a walk a five-mile walk daily, rain,
snow, or shine."
" Yes that was it, doctor," said Sophy humbly.
"Well?"
" I I did it."
" Until you felt all right again."
" My appetite came back."
" Um um," he exclaimed contemptuously. " And
the walk?"
" I take a drive almost every day."
" Didn't I tell you that while we're all moving toward
death, those who walked there arrived long after those
who drove? "
" You told me not to drive, if I could help it. But
doctor, it's impossible for a woman of my physique "
" And what are you doing with such a physique? "
demanded he. " In Strasburg where I was born the
people live by nailing the feet of geese to the floor and
stuffing them till their livers get fat. You treat your
self as those Strasburgers treat their geese. Didn't I
tell you that fat was a disease? Didn't I warn you
that if you let that disease run a few years longer, you'd
be a shapeless mass before you were forty ? "
" I wanted to see you about that, too," she said has
tily. She colored. " I suppose you think I'm vain and
set on foolishness that doesn't belong to my time of
life "
"Nonsense!" he interjected. "You're a young
74
SOPHY SEEKS A CONFESSOR
woman. You've been letting yourself go to rack and
ruin. That's the way with human beings. Give them
a chance at luxury, and they act like a cow in a corn
patch. There's no excuse for you. If you hadn't a
magnificent constitution, you'd be dead. You most
of the women of your class are a disgrace. Never
exercising, always ailing tossed up in bed much of
the time taking on fat."
" Now, doctor! " she pleaded. " You're unjust. It
runs in our family to lose our looks and get fat
young."
" Then it runs in your family to lazy about and
eat enough at each meal to choke them up for a week.
It runs in families to be ignorant, madam, unless they
go to school. It runs in families to be dishonest, un
less they learn to make a living by honest work. It
runs in families to "
" Well, anyhow," she interrupted sullenly, " I want
to get thin or, at least, thinner."
" One sensible meal a day, and a ten-mile walk
regularly."
" But I want to get thinner right away. I must
must ! " she exclaimed.
" It can't be done."
" I know there's some medicine I could take "
" I'm a healer, not a murderer. Any medicine you
took to make you thin would shorten your life."
Sophy began to sob. " I don't care if it does," she
cried hysterically. " I can't live on, this way I I
I'm losing my husband. He's trying to pretend he's
a young man and is looking about. He don't admire
stout women I always knew it, but I couldn't help
being stout. Besides, it's his duty to love me, his
wedded wife, the mother of his children."
75
OLD WIVES FOR NEW
" One meal a day ; ten miles regularly."
"Yes yes I'll even do that," cried she. "Oh, my
God, doctor ! You don't know how I'm suffering. Not
the physical pain that's nothing. But can't you
appreciate the misery, the heartache? What fiends
men are! He took the best of my life, my beauty and
my youth. And now he wants to cast me off. Yes,
I know he does. Haven't I seen how the good women
are treated by their husbands. How coarse and low
married life is ! A girl thinks it's romance. She thinks
love means something above mere physical passion.
Yet it's nothing but that at least, the love of man
is nothing but that. He never cared anything for me
except for my looks "
Schulze held up his stubby finger. " Listen to me,
madam," he said. " Suppose you wanted a loaf of
bread. Suppose you saw a lot of loaves in a bakeshop
window. You'd take the one that looked best, wouldn't
you?"
She made no reply.
" Are you listening ? " he demanded severely.
" Yes," she said, gathering herself together.
"Wouldn't you?"
" Yes," she muttered.
" That's it ! " he exclaimed. " A man wants a wife.
He takes the girl that looks the best to him. Why
not? That's not coarse and low; it's sensible. It's
the wisdom of instinct. The girl with the clear eyes
and skin, the girl with the form that comes nearest
the ideal of health and strength and a capacity for
maternity. Sound hearts and sound minds live in
sound bodies. Well! Now, suppose when he gets his
loaf home he finds it's not good bread, finds that the
brown, crisp surface was merely a trick, a snare "
76
SOPHY SEEKS A CONFESSOR
" But I've been a good wife to him. I've made him
a home "
" You've made yourself a home," said Schulze im
patiently. " Don't cant, madam at least not to me.
You've come to me to get well, not to pose. You your
self had to live somehow and somewhere, didn't you?