George, it makes me sick to think about it—that poor old man left there all alone, rotting away with that awful cancer, with that horrible smell about him all the time—everything he wears gets simply stiff with that rotten corrupt matter—Do you know what it is to wait, wait, wait, year after year, and year after year, never knowing when he’s going to die, to have him hang on by a thread until it seems you’ve lived forever—that there’ll never be an end—that you’ll never have a chance to live your own life—to have a moment’s peace or rest or happiness yourself? My God, does it always have to be this way?… Can I never have a moment’s happiness?… Must they always come to me? Does everything have to be put on my shoulders?… Will you tell me that?” Her voice had risen to a note of frenzied despair. She was glaring at her cousin with a look of desperate and frantic entreaty, her whole gaunt figure tense and strained with the stress of her hysteria.
“That’s—that’s the trouble now,” said Barton, looking down and searching for the word. “She’s… She’s… made the goat for every one…. She… she has to do it all…. That’s… that’s the thing that’s got her down.”
“Not that I mind—if it will do any good…. Good heaven’s, Papa’s life means more to me than anything on earth…. I’d keep him alive at any cost as long as there was a breath left in him…. But it’s the strain of it, the strain of it—to wait, to wait year after year, to feel it hanging over you all the time, never to know when he will die—always the strain, the strain—do you see what I mean, George?” she said hoarsely, eagerly, and pleadingly. “You see, don’t you?”
“I sure do, Helen,” he said sympathetically, digging at his thigh, and with a swift, cat-like grimace of his features. “I know it’s been mighty tough on you…. How is Uncle Will now?” he said. “Is he any better?”
“Why, yes,” the mother was saying, “he seemed to improve—” but she was cut off immediately.
“Oh, yes,” the daughter said in a tone of weary dejection. “He pulled out of this last spell and got well enough to make the trip to Baltimore—we sent him back a week ago to take another course of treatments…. But it does no real good, George…. They can’t cure him…. We know that now…. They’ve told us that…. It only prolongs the agony…. They help him for a little while and then it all begins again…. Poor old man!” she said, and her eyes were wet. “I’d give everything I have—my own blood, my own life—if it would do him any good—but, George,
