The Stingy Receiver by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Author:Eleanor Hallowell Abbott [Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Fiction & Literature
ISBN: 4064066216863
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2019-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

II

Table of Contents

THAT the Young Doctor bought himself a new blue serge suit for Saturday was no indication whatsoever that he looked forward to that day with any pleasurable anticipation. Lots of people "doll-up" for disaster who couldn't even be hired to brush their hair for joy.

Quite frankly if anybody had asked him about it, the Young Doctor would have rated Mrs. Tome Gallien as a disaster.

If pressed further for justification of such a rating he would have argued that any rich woman who couldn't sleep was a disaster!

"Oh, it's all well enough for poor people," he would have admitted, "to put in the long night watches mulling over the weird things that they'd like to do. But when a person is actually able to leap up at the first gay crack of dawn and finance the weirdest fancy of his night!

"Oh, of course," he was honest enough to 80acknowledge. "Poor Mrs. Tome Gallien would never again while life lasted be able to 'leap up' at any hour of the day or night! And she doubtless in her fifty eccentric years had given extravagantly to no end of people who had proved themselves the stingiest sort of receivers! And her sense of humor even in her remotest, happiest youth must have been of course essentially caustic!

"But how any woman could reach a point so sick, so vindictive, so caustic, so rich, that still unable to strip herself of her lifelong passion for giving she should evolve the perfectly diabolic idea of giving people only the things that they didn't want—only the things, indeed, that she was absolutely positive they didn't want? Such as pianos! Grand pianos! Huge rosewood chunks of intricate mechanism and ornate decoration and Heaven knows what expense—crammed down into the meager crowded office of some poor struggling young doctor who didn't know a note from a gnat! Himself of course being the young doctor!

"Thought it was funny, did she? Thought it would really drive him outdoors for sheer 81 rage into some sort of an enlivening adventure? That was her theory, was it? Well it was funny. And it had driven him out to meet a rather particularly enlivening sort of adventure! Which adventure in the person of a Miss Solvei Kjelland was now due at his office by her own insistent appointment, on Saturday afternoon at four o'clock. But this Miss Solvei Kjelland, it seems, was not the Adventure which Mrs. Tome Gallien had already arranged for him for Saturday afternoon, same hour, same place?"

Into his muddled mind flashed transiently a half-forgotten line of a novel to the effect: "Heaven help the day when the mate you made for yourself and the mate God made for you happen to meet!"

"Well, if it really came to a show-down between his Adventure and Mrs. Tome Gallien's?"

Quite unexpectedly his mouth began suddenly to twitch at one corner. Speaking of "caustic humor" it was barely possible that the Young Doctor had just a tiny bit of caustic humor himself. When a man smiles suddenly on one side of his mouth it is proof at least 82that he sees the joke.

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