Lewis smiled, that peculiar fleeting smile of his. But it was for himself this time. He had assumed the position he kept through all these office interviews. His chair was swung half around on its pivot so that he did not directly face the patient, and his eyes, for the most part, were on the knob of the door leading into Miss Frazier’s little private office. “Of course you have pull, Dick, all the pull in the world. But I don’t see what that has to do with it. When it comes to taking on patients, one does it on the merits of the cases themselves, naturally. Let me hear.”

“Well, it’s the stepdaughter who is—funny. Clare, who is my friend the stepmother, do you see, is utterly devoted to the girl. In fact, to my mind, she is almost obsessed with the idea that it’s up to her to make the girl happy. That’s far-fetched, of course. You can’t do that for any one. But Clare tries desperately. And all she gets for her pains is very nice polite manners and nothing under ’em. It is absurd. You would think so—you will think so—when you see Clare. But even if Clare weren’t so wonderful as she is, the girl’s indifference would still be absurd, for just on the material side she owes Clare everything she’s got in the world. She and her father were as poor as poverty until Clare came into their lives, married the father. Now that she is there, their lives are all luxury.—Charm.—Beauty too. But what good does it do? Clare is only getting her heart broken.

“But I ought to tell you,” Dick went on quickly, after a second’s pause in which he had suddenly remembered some last admonishments of Clare’s, “Clare doesn’t mind personal heartbreaks and things like that. That is not why she wants you to psychoanalyze the girl. It is for the girl’s own sake and her father’s sake. She doesn’t want those two to become estranged. And it is bound to happen if things go on the way they are going. The girl must be more responsive to Clare, return some of her devotion, or the father is going to begin to feel the antagonism in the air and blame his daughter for it. For, in a choice of loyalties, the man is Clare’s. It isn’t Clare’s fault it’s that way, though. From the very beginning she has worked to preserve—even to create—a fine relationship between her husband and his daughter. She is big enough, detached enough, to keep herself and her personal disappointments out of the situation and think only of those two. And that’s why she sent me here, at dollars a minute, I suppose, to ask you to see the girl and straighten her out. She has an idea that there is some deeply hidden resentment—some mix-up, anyway—in the girl’s subconscious mind and that it only needs you to excavate it. She thinks—”

But there Dick faltered. Lewis was smiling and no longer fleetingly. Miss Frazier, noticing Dick look around for it, pushed an ashtray along the desk toward him. He crushed out his cigarette stub in it, looking miserable and a little angry. “I can see what you’re thinking, Lewis,” he exclaimed. “You think that it is a simple case of stepdaughterish jealousy and that Clare and I are just too ingenuous for words to have come bothering a top-notch psychiatrist with it. But you happen to be wrong. You don’t know the people. Petra’s not jealous. Not for a minute. She hasn’t enough warmth in her for such a passion, if it comes to that. Really, she’s no jollier with her own father than with her stepmother. But Clare doesn’t see that. She thinks it’s only herself Petra pushes off. And what is there so absurd in her getting the idea that you might help?”

But if Dick had only noticed, his belated mention of the girl’s name had effectually changed his friend’s expression.

“Is it Petra Farwell you’re talking about?” he asked quickly. “Daughter of Lowell Farwell, the novelist?”

Dick hesitated an instant, glancing a little painfully at Miss Frazier’s efficient hand with its pen poised but so far idle—above her pad. But after all, Miss Frazier’s presence at this conference was Lewis’ responsibility, and one had to trust Lewis.

So he said, “Yes. It’s the Farwells. I thought you would guess. You know I built their house, Green Doors. We started it the minute they were back from the honeymoon. Clare made Featherstone’s give me a free hand with it. It was my first real chance at self expression. But Clare had as many ideas as I had and the nice part was that our ideas didn’t clash—merely supplemented. Until that summer I had only known Clare socially and even so not very well. She is in an older crowd. It’s an interesting crowd. The Lovings, you know,—the Stracheys, Jim Strange, Isabell Peters Clough. Rather exciting, being accepted by them! Clare sees to it that I am. And Lowell Farwell is the lion of the lot, I suppose. Clare herself ought to be. Wait till you meet her!”

“I have met Mrs. Farwell, once, for a few minutes,” Lewis said. “She was Mrs. Tom Otis then. It was just before the former Mrs. Farwell abdicated. But it’s Petra, the girl, I’m interested to hear about. Is she prepared to come to a psychiatrist for treatment for—what do you say the trouble is? General lack of appropriate feeling toward the latest Mrs. Novelist’s Wife? Or hasn’t she been consulted?”

“You keep on laughing at us,” Dick complained. “If I were a stranger, would you? Yes, I knew about that meeting with Clare, of course. But I meant, wait till you really know her. Clare hasn’t said a word about you to Petra, not yet. Petra would be sure to resent it, don’t you think? What Clare wants is to have it come about—gradually. If you’re week-ending at Cynthia’s, right there in Meadowbrook, you can drop around at Green Doors, meet the family, have tea informally in the garden, chat with Petra,—and let that call seem to put the idea of having Petra psychoanalyzed into Clare’s head. That way, Petra might get the idea that being psychoanalyzed by Doctor Lewis Pryne would be a pretty interesting experience, do you see? That’s Clare’s scheme and I think it’s a good one.”

Lewis, lighting himself another cigarette, murmured, “Good is an adjective that I myself seldom apply to the word ‘scheme.’ But it happens that I’ll like meeting Lowell Farwell. His psychological novels interest me—at least, to the point of wanting to find out how he gets that way. Even more I shall be glad of an excuse to see Petra again. I met her at the same time I met your Mrs. Clare. By the way, Mrs. Clare is Petra’s second or third stepmother, isn’t she! Mightn’t it be that the child’s stand-offish attitude toward the species is cumulative and not, strictly speaking, personal? Had that occurred to either of you?... But it doesn’t matter. I’m charmed by the invitation to tea at Green Doors. It’s only fair, though, that you should warn Mrs. Farwell that it cannot, not possibly, be a professional call. And just remind yourself, will you, Dick, if only now and then, that I’m not a psychoanalyst. It always annoys me a little, being called one.”

“Sorry. Yes, I do know, of course. But the differences are too slight for the laity to master. Then you will come for tea? That’s fine. All we wanted, as a start-off, really. Clare knows you won’t be lionized and I can promise you it will be informal. Shall we say Saturday afternoon? It’ll be just the Farwells themselves and me. I’m there such a lot, I’m almost family,” he added, flushing a little.

Dick was ready to get out now and give place to Mrs. Dickerman and Mr. McCloud. But he had a diffident feeling that since this was actually a professional seance he had been having with Lewis, it was up to Lewis to bring it to an end. And Lewis had not stirred in his chair. He was saying, “I’ll like seeing your work with that house, too. I’ve meant to get Cynthia to take me over, ever since you finished it. Why do they call it Green Doors?”

Lewis’ gaze, as he spoke, was still attached to the knob on Miss Frazier’s door. Dick, now that he had secured part of what Clare wanted and was no longer anxious, was looking at his friend with an increasing discernment in his vision.

“He’s got the look of a medieval monk,” he told himself,—seeing it, strangely, for the first time. Well, perhaps asceticism was the price Lewis had had to pay for his astonishing success. He had accomplished in ten years or so what usually takes a man in his profession the better part of his life, if he ever achieves it at all. “Naturally Lewis hasn’t had much time for the flesh-pots along the way,” mused Dick.

Doctor Lewis Pryne was only thirty-three, and yet in the years since graduating from Harvard Medical he had made himself a specialist in psychiatry, written three instantly famous books on dynamic psychology, and accumulated a clientele which might be the envy of any other psychiatrist not congenitally superior to envy, in the country. And he was self-made. At least, ever since his father had died when Lewis was a Senior in Latin High, he had earned his own way, and looked out for Cynthia as well, until she married Dick’s cousin, Harry Allen. Yet here he was, in spite of that stupendous early handicap, loaded with fame and honor—and if not with money, that was simply because money did not seem to be one of his goals.

Meeting Lewis in the ordinary way—that is, outside of an office visit—you got no hint of past struggles and their necessary austerities. His gray eyes were more sleepy than austere, with a languid droop at the outer corners of the heavy upper lids. His mouth curled, slightly, as if fleeting little smiles were habitual, and most of the time an almost palpable light played over the lower part of the face, particularly the full but chiseled lips. Without that light and the odd, fleeting smile, Lewis’ mouth would have been definitely sensuous. As it was, you never thought of that—only of its sensitive but exquisitely impersonal sympathy.

The gray sleepy eyes released the door knob, came to rest on Dick Wilder’s face. “How did Green Doors come by its name?”

Dick started, realizing that this was a repeated question. What had he been woolgathering about? Lewis, himself. He had been busy seeing Lewis in a new, fresh way, after a fifteen years’ friendship. That was strange. Then he understood it. He had been seeing Lewis as Clare would soon be seeing him,—looking at him through Clare’s eyes.

“Oh? The name? It was Clare’s idea. It’s in a poem. Published in The Glebe, 1914.” (He got up as he answered. Lewis’ time was precious, and staying to chatter now would be inexcusable, after Lewis had been so altogether patient and friendly.) “I don’t remember it all. But there’s a line—

“Something like that anyway. Clare said we wouldn’t plan a house at all, but just green doors, opening to the sun. We’ve done it too! You’ll see, Saturday. I’ll pick you up at the Allens’ around four. Crazy to show the place to you!”

During the brief interval between Dick Wilder’s departure from the office and Mrs. Dickerman’s entrance, Lewis stood in the big window at the back of his desk, looking down onto the glistening river of automobile tops which was Marlboro Street, and recalled his first and only meeting with Petra—the girl who was, so it seemed, the one discordant note in the idyllic existence at that country estate, already famous to literature,—Green Doors, in Meadowbrook.