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Page 22

"It's in the most damnable knot!" she said, and Harmony was
suddenly aware that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.

"Please don't pay any attention to me," she implored. "I hate to
sew. That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm
a fool about music."

"Perhaps, if you hate to sew--"

"I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I
hate being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German
cooking and clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor
as a church-mouse and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had
any children!"

Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the
next moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the
flannel and was smiling up through her glasses.

"The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say
I'm really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The
food's bad and I can't afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a
room and do my own cooking, but what time have I?" She spread out
the pieces of flannel on her knee. "Does this look like anything
to you?"

"A petticoat, isn't it?"

"I didn't intend it as a petticoat."

"I thought, on account of the scallops--"

"Scallops!" Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and
from them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous
mirth.

"Scallops!" she gasped at last. "Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me
cutting 'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!"

Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately
flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using
little adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of
talk led to Peter--Peter's future, Peter's poverty, Peter's
refusing to have his hair cut, Peter's encounter with a major of
the guards, and the duel Peter almost fought. It developed that
Peter, as the challenged, had had the choice of weapons, and had
chosen fists, and that the major had been carried away. Dr. Gates
grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back on the pink
flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces, united,
were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the
hospital. "Although," she commented, "it looks more like a chair
cover."

Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was
lined with a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she
straightened the crooked edges she told the doctor about the
wedding dress, and about the mother who had called her Harmony
because of the hope in her heart. And soon, by dint of skillful
listening, which is always better than questioning, the faded
little woman doctor knew all the story.

She was rather aghast.

"But suppose you cannot find anything to do?"

"I must," simply.

"It's such a terrible city for a girl alone."

"I'm not really alone. I know you now."

"An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!"

"And there is Peter Byrne."

"Peter!" Dr. Gates sniffed. "Peter is poorer than I am, if there
is any comparison in destitution!"

Harmony stiffened a trifle.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Sun 21st Dec 2025, 6:15

The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart