The thriving town attracted professional as well as business men. A dentist should find plenty to do where so many of the population of both sexes earned good wages. Dr. Patterson after frittering his time away here for months had been to see his wife’s family and doubtless had been admonished by both Mark Baker and Mrs. Alexander Tilton. The latter, believing rigidly in the conventionalities as she did, thought it not proper that Dr. Patterson should keep up his meandering and his desultory occupations. His fitful, incoherent busying of himself with first one project and then another bore no relation to the continuity of existence and compelled his wife to remain in suspended expectation, a guest of relatives and friends, awaiting his mood. Thus Abigail Tilton had taken him to task roundly, and smarting under her words, he had rented the office in Lynn and, with a revival of exuberance and excessive overconfidence, had inserted an advertisement in the local paper in which he asked those whom he had met in his brother dentists’ offices to patronize him in the future and stated that he hoped to secure the patronage of “all the rest of mankind.” He gradually secured a respectable practise, for he was a good dentist and might have succeeded very well had he been less idle, boisterous, and romantic. But he was a born rover, and coupled with his restlessness was a silly vanity in his powers of fascination over equally silly and romantic women. When Mrs. Patterson rejoined him after over two years of separation, it was for but a brief reunion of little more than a year’s duration.
