Do Evil In Return Read Free Page A

is right.”
    “That’s nice.”
    “Nice.” He frowned; his black, bushy eyebrows made him look cruel. “Charley, there’s something the matter with you tonight. I’ve said or done the wrong thing again. Or you’re still sore about the fishing trip.”
    “I’m not sore. I have something on my mind. A patient who came in this afternoon.”
    “Tell me about him.”
    “Her. I can’t tell you.”
    “You often do, medical ethics to the contrary.”
    “I know… Lewis, I think I made a mistake.” She stood at the window locking and unlocking her fingers. Somewhere in the city, in the chaos of yellow and red and green lights was the light that belonged to Violet—a dim, flyspecked light in the back room of a boarding house on Olive Street. And Gwen—there was a light for Gwen, too, as she sat waiting for Lewis to come home, patient and sweet as always, with the collies beside her, all of them as gentle as Gwen herself.
    “As long as you didn’t kill anybody,” Lewis said, “by giving them the wrong prescription.”
    “I don’t make mistakes like that. This was an error in judgment. The girl—everything the girl said was right. I was afraid, I still am. But such silly, trivial fears compared to hers… And she said I’ve never been desperate. I haven’t. I’ve never had anything to make me desperate.”
    She turned suddenly, aware of a subtle change in the atmosphere. Lewis was lighting a cigarette. She knew from his expression that he was disappointed and angry at the way the evening was turning out. Their first evening together for a week—it should have been perfect, and it wasn’t, and Lewis was silently blaming her, as if it were her fault that the two of them couldn’t live separate from the rest of the world. She and Lewis would never, could never be alone, in spite of the stone wall on three sides of the house. The fourth side was unguarded, unprotected. Violet crept in, and Gwen, and Miss Schiller, even the two men who’d gone with Lewis on the fishing trip.
    She said, with a sigh, “I feel depressed and quarrelsome, Lewis. Perhaps you’d better go home.”
    “Perhaps I had.” He ground out his cigarette in the myrtle wood ash tray he’d brought her from up north. “Though I don’t like being ordered around like a little boy.”
    “I didn’t mean it to sound unpleasant, darling. I meant, we’ll only quarrel if you stay.”
    “You can sound pretty officious. God, Charley, what do you think I’m made of? You keep me hanging around, you tell me to come, and then you tell me to go peddle my papers. You rant about some silly girl and her fears when we’ve got a million things to say to each other about us.” He got up and grabbed her roughly by the shoulders. “Who cares, who the hell cares? Charley, you haven’t changed your mind, you still love me?”
    “Yes. Naturally.”
    “When I hold you, you draw away as if I had a bad smell.”
    “Oh Lewis, for heaven’s sake,” she said sharply, pulling away from his grasp. “I told you, I’m not myself tonight. Everything’s wrong, out of focus.”
    He looked grim. “Because of this girl?”
    “I suppose that started it.”
    “Why?”
    “She’s in trouble. I refused to help her.”
    “Why should you help her? She’s probably just an ordinary tart who got caught.”
    “No. She’s a nice girl, sensitive, and very bewildered.”
    “You’ve had cases like that before. Why does this one worry you?”
    “Because of us, Lewis. Don’t you see…?”
    “No.”
    “If we go on together, if we become lovers, I might accidentally end up in the same boat she’s in.”
    He let out a snort of disgust. “I see now. For some extraordinary reason you’ve identified yourself with this girl, and me with the man who got her in trouble, the callous, bestial male.”
    “No, I haven’t.” She looked up at him, searching his face for some sign that he understood. “What would you do if I got pregnant?”
    “Considering our present