One afternoon early in May, Helen met McGuire upon the street. He had just driven in behind Wood’s Pharmacy on Academy Street, and was preparing to go in to the prescription counter when she approached him. He got out of his big dusty-looking roadster with a painful grunt, slammed the door, and began to fumble slowly in the pockets of his baggy coat for a cigarette. He turned slowly as she spoke, grunted, “Hello, Helen,” stuck the cigarette on his fat under-lip and lighted it, and then, looking at her with his brutal, almost stupid, but somehow kindly glance, he barked coarsely:
“What’s on your mind?”
“It’s about Papa,” she began in a low, hoarse and almost morbid tone—“Now I want to know if this last attack means that the end has come. You’ve got to tell me—we’ve got the right to know about it—”
The look of strain and hysteria on her big-boned face, her dull eyes fixed on him in a morbid stare, the sore on her large cleft chin, above all, the brooding insistence of her tone as she repeated phrases he had heard ten thousand times before suddenly rasped upon his frayed nerves, stretched them to the breaking-point; he lost his air of hard professionalism and exploded in a flare of brutal anger:
“You want to know what? You’ve got a right to be told what? For God’s sake,”—his tone was brutal, rasping, jeering—“pull yourself together and stop acting like a child.” And then, a little more quietly, but brusquely, he demanded:
“All right. What do you want to know?”
“I want to know how long he’s going to last,” she said with morbid insistence. “Now, you’re a doctor,” she wagged her large face at him with an air of challenge that infuriated him, “and you ought to tell us. We’ve got to know!”
“Tell you! Got to know!” he shouted. “What the hell are you talking about? What do you expect to be told?”
“How long Papa has to live,” she said with the same morbid insistence as before.
“You’ve asked me that a thousand times,” he said harshly. “I’ve told you that I didn’t know. He may live another month, he may be here a year from now—how can we tell about these things,” he said in an exasperated tone, “particularly where your father is concerned. Helen, three or four years ago I might have made a prediction. I did make them—I didn’
