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Page 52
"Well, Miss Pollyanna, may I have the pleasure of seeing you
home?" asked the doctor smilingly. "I started to drive on a few
minutes ago; then it occurred to me that I'd wait for you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm glad you did. I just love to ride," beamed
Pollyanna, as he reached out his hand to help her in.
"Do you?" smiled the doctor, nodding his head in farewell to the
young man on the steps. "Well, as near as I can judge, there are
a good many things you 'love' to do--eh?" he added, as they drove
briskly away.
Pollyanna laughed.
"Why, I don't know. I reckon perhaps there are," she admitted. "I
like to do 'most everything that's LIVING. Of course I don't like
the other things very well--sewing, and reading out loud, and all
that. But THEY aren't LIVING."
"No? What are they, then?"
"Aunt Polly says they're 'learning to live,' sighed Pollyanna,
with a rueful smile.
The doctor smiled now--a little queerly.
"Does she? Well, I should think she might say--just that."
"Yes," responded Pollyanna. "But I don't see it that way at all.
I don't think you have to LEARN how to live. I didn't, anyhow."
The doctor drew a long sigh.
"After all, I'm afraid some of us--do have to, little girl," he
said. Then, for a time he was silent. Pollyanna, stealing a
glance at his face, felt vaguely sorry for him. He looked so sad.
She wished, uneasily, that she could "do something." It was this,
perhaps, that caused her to say in a timid voice:
"Dr. Chilton, I should think being a doctor would, be the very
gladdest kind of a business there was."
The doctor turned in surprise.
" 'Gladdest'!--when I see so much suffering always, everywhere I
go?" he cried.
She nodded.
"I know; but you're HELPING it--don't you see?--and of course
you're glad to help it! And so that makes you the gladdest of any
of us, all the time."
The doctor's eyes filled with sudden hot tears. The doctor's life
was a singularly lonely one. He had no wife and no home save his
two-room office in a boarding house. His profession was very dear
to him. Looking now into Pollyanna's shining eyes, he felt as if
a loving hand had been suddenly laid on his head in blessing. He
knew, too, that never again would a long day's work or a long
night's weariness be quite without that new-found exaltation that
had come to him through Pollyanna's eyes.
"God bless you, little girl," he said unsteadily. Then, with the
bright smile his patients knew and loved so well, he added: "And
I'm thinking, after all, that it was the doctor, quite as much as
his patients, that needed a draft of that tonic!" All of which
puzzled Pollyanna very much--until a chipmunk, running across the
road, drove the whole matter from her mind.
The doctor left Pollyanna at her own door, smiled at Nancy, who
was sweeping off the front porch, then drove rapidly away.
"I've had a perfectly beautiful ride with the doctor," announced
Pollyanna, bounding up the steps. "He's lovely, Nancy!"
"Is he?"
"Yes. And I told him I should think his business would be the
very gladdest one there was."
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