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I can't make out what it is. If I could I'd tell you; but I don't know at all." After they had sat silent a few moments: "I wonder" she began. "You wonder what?" asked he, in a rallying tone. "I wonder if there's such a thing as being too contented." Richling began to hum, with a playful manner: "'And she's all the world to me. Is that being too" "Stop!" said Mary. "That's it."
"Easy little tasks you cut out for your friends," said the rector to Richling when next they met. "I got preached to not to say edified. I'll share my edification with you!" He told his experience. It was a sinister place, the prison apartment.
Mary street, corner of Prytania. Lower corner opposite the asylum. The place was far up in the newer part of the American quarter. The signature had the appearance as if the writer had begun to write some other name, and had changed it to Richling.
And this was true at least as to one ragamuffin, who stood on a neighboring corner staring at them. Yet there is no telling to what higher pitch their humor might have carried them if Mrs. Richling had not been weighted down by the constant necessity of correcting her husband's statement of their wants. This she could do, because his exactions were all in the direction of her comfort.
He slipped down from his stool and came near enough to contribute his congratulatory smiles, though he did not venture to speak. Richling nodded him a happy how-d'ye-do, and the Creole replied by a wave of the hand. In the Doctor's manner, on the other hand, there was a decided lack of response that made Richling check his spirits and resume more slowly, "Do you know a man named Reisen?"
"Doctor," said Richling at once, "the last time you said it was love-sickness; this time you say it's excitement; at the bottom it isn't either. Will you please tell me what it really is? What is this thing that puts me here on my back this way?" "Richling," replied the Doctor, slowly, "if I tell you the honest truth, it began in that prison."
Narcisse, on receiving his scolding from Richling, had gone to his home in Casa Calvo street, a much greater sufferer than he had appeared to be. While he was confronting his abaser there had been a momentary comfort in the contrast between Richling's ill-behavior and his own self-control. It had stayed his spirit and turned the edge of Richling's sharp denunciations.
Richling rallied to his defences. "I think I could make a good book-keeper, or correspondent, or cashier, or any such" The Doctor interrupted, with the back of his head toward his listener, looking this time up the street, riverward: "Yes; or a shoe, or a barrel, h-m-m?" Richling bent forward with the frown of defective hearing, and the physician raised his voice: "Or a cart-wheel or a coat?"
Narcisse had already apologized by two or three gestures to each of his hearers. "Misses Itchlin Mistoo Itchlin," he shook his head and smiled skeptically, "you think you kin admiah Doctah Seveeah mo' than me? 'Tis uzeless to attempt. 'With all 'is fault I love 'im still." Richling and his wife both spoke at once. "But John and I," exclaimed Mary, electrically, "love him, faults and all!"
Even as she lay there in peril of her life, and flattened out as though Juggernaut had rolled over her, her eyes shone with happiness and scintillated as the Doctor exclaimed in undertone: "Yours!" He laid his hand upon her forehead. "Where is Mr. Richling?" "At the office." Her eyes danced with delight.
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