The Long Way by Mary Imlay Taylor

Rachel had been married a week and a day when Dr. Macclesfield came to drink a cup of tea with her in her new home.

Dr. Macclesfield was a little, old man who might have been eighty and looked seventy. His face was seamed with wrinkles in curious criss-crosses, like the stitches in drawn-work, and he still shaved twice daily; he said that he did not care to grow a moustache, that his always caught up vermicelli. His small eyes twinkled with curiosity; nothing escaped him, but his sense of humor made him delightful. He had retired from practice but was still consulted in difficult cases; he was wealthy but his charities kept his income down to normal limits. His wife had been dead twenty years and he had no children, so he was perpetually interested in other people's affairs. People appealed to him keenly; he studied them, divided them into classes, found fault with them, and loved them. In his youth and middle age he had had an insatiable passion for work; he had labored at his profession as some men labor in a quarry. He had worn out a dozen young assistants and driven an orderly and methodical wife nearly out of her senses. She had lived and died complaining that the doctor never came home to meals on time, and never got through one without an interruption; she said that cold soups were perpetual and that it was useless to have pancakes.