He told himself that it was absurd to expect Amy to adjust herself all in a minute to a thing he had known about for years, had all the time known from within. He would make Amy understand; if Ruth came, Amy would be good to her. At heart she was not like those others, and happiness would make her want to be kind.
He saw her face lifted for that second good-by kiss--and quickened his speed. He hoped he would not have to be long at the hospital, hoped Amy would not be asleep when he got back home. He lingered happily around the thought of there being a home to go back to, of how Amy would be there when he got back.
But it was at a slower speed that, an hour later, he traveled those same streets. He had lost his patient. It was no failure of the operator, but one of those cases where the particular human body is not equal to the demand made upon it, where there was no reaction. He got no satisfaction in telling himself that the woman could not have lived long without the operation; she had not lived with it--that was the only side it turned to him. The surgery was all right enough, but life had ebbed away. It brought a sense of who was master.
He had been practising for twelve years, but death always cut deep into his spirit. It was more than chagrin, more than the disheartenment of the workman at failure, when he lost a patient. It was a real sense of death, and with that a feeling of man's final powerlessness.
That made it a different town through which he drove upon his return; a town where people cut their way ruthlessly through life--and to what end? They might be a little kinder to each other along the way, it would seem, when this was what it came to for them all. They were kind enough about death--not so kind about the mean twists in life.
That feeling was all wrapped up with Ruth Holland; it brought Ruth to him. He thought of the many times they had traveled that road together, times when he would take her where she could meet Stuart Williams, then pick her up again and bring her home, her family thinking she had been with him. How would he ever make Amy understand about that? It seemed now that it could not be done, that it would be something they did not share, perhaps something lying hostilely between them. He wondered why it had not seemed to him the shameful thing it would appear to anyone he told of it. Was that something twisted in him, or was it just that utter difference between knowing things from within and judging from without? To himself, it was never in the form of argument he defended Ruth. It was the memory of her face at those times when he had seen what she was feeling.