bruskness.

"What else do you propose to take?" asked the Young Doctor a bit dryly.

"You!" said the woman.

At the edge of the bureau the Young Doctor wheeled abruptly in his tracks.

"Well, you won t!" he said. His face was quite white with anger.

"Why not?" drawled the woman. As ruthlessly as a child she seemed to be estimating suddenly the faintly perceptible shine of the man's shoulder seams. Only the frankness of the stare relieved it of its 31insolence. "Why not?" she said. "Is your practice here so huge that you can totally afford to ignore a salary such as I would give you?"

"Nevertheless," winced the Young Doctor, "even you cannot buy everything!"

"Can't I?" smiled the woman. In passionate willfulness and pride her smile straightened out again into its thin-lipped line. "But I need you!" she asserted arrogantly. "I like you! If I had had my choice of every practitioner in the city, I— I!" With a precipitous whimper of nerves the tears began suddenly to stream down her cheeks. "There is—there is something about you," she stammered. "In a—in a trolley car accident, in a steamer panic, out of a—out of a thousand," she sobbed, "I instinctively would have turned to you!" As abruptly as it had come, the flood of tears vanished from her face, leaving instead a gray-streaked flicker of incredulity. "Why, I don't even know how I did happen to get you!" she admitted aghast. "Out of all the doctors in the city—it must have been intended! It must! If there's any Providence at all it must arrange 32 such details! How did I happen to get you?" she demanded imperiously.

For the first time across the Young Doctor's lean, ascetic face an expression of relaxation quickened.

"Well if you really want to know," he said. "As you were being lifted out of your carriage at the hotel door, I was just coming out of the Free Lunch——"

"Hunger or thirst?" scoffed the woman.

"None of your business," smiled the Young Doctor.

"Oh, and besides," rallied the woman instantly. "I thought, likely as not, that there might be some girl. Somebody you could coach! About my passion for shopping, I mean! I don't care who gets the things! If there's anybody you like, she might just as well be the one!"

"Thank you," rebristled the Young Doctor. "But I don't happen to know any girls!"

"Good enough!" said the woman. "Then there's nothing at all to complicate your coming!"

"But I'm not coming!" stared the Young Doctor. The pupils of his eyes were dilated 33like a deer's jacked suddenly with an infuriating light.

"But you are coming," said the woman without a flicker of emotion. "Day after tomorrow it is. At three-thirty from the Pennsylvania Station."

"I'm not!" said the Young Doctor.

"You are!" said the woman.

When it comes right down to the matter of statistics, just how many times in your life you've had your own way and just how many times you haven't, Mrs. Tome Gallien was not exaggerating when she boasted to the Young Doctor that she was quite in the habit of having her own way. She certainly was! In the majority of incidents she had, indeed, always had her own way. And in the majority of incidents she had her own way now. That is to say, that the South Carolina train did leave the Pennsylvania Station at just exactly the time she said it would. And Martha the deaf was on that train. And she, herself, was on that train.

But the Young Doctor was not.

"Not much! Not much!" was the way the 34Young Doctor said it, if you really want to know.

But he said very little else that afternoon. To be perfectly frank his luncheon had been very poor, and his breakfast, before that, and his dinner, before that. Further reiteration would be purely monotonous. Moreover, on this particular February day the weather was extravagantly Northern, his office, as cold and dark and bleak as some untenanted back alley, and his general professional prospects as dull as, if not indeed duller than, the last puff of ashes in his pipe. Yet even so he counted his situation ecstasy compared to the thought of being dragged South by the wrapper-strings of a gray-haired invalid-woman as headstrong as she was body-weak. "Not much!" Long after there was no tugging warm taste left in his pipe he was still tugging at the phrase. "Not much!"

But Mrs. Tome Gallien on her fine train scudding South was even more chary of words than he when it came to her own comment on his defection.

"Idjot!" she telegraphed back from Washington. 35

The operator who repeated the message over the telephone was frankly apologetic.

"Yes, Doctor," explained the metallic voice. "That's just exactly the way we received it. It isn't even 'idiot'" argued the voice. "Because we wired back for verification. 'I-d-j-o-t!' That's what it is. Maybe it's a—a code word," condoned the voice amiably.

It certainly was a "code" word. And the message that it sought to convey was plainly this:

"How any young struggling practitioner in a strange city, with not only his future to make but even his present, how such a one has got the nerve, the nerve, I say, to refuse a regular salaried position and all expenses, all expenses, mind you, in a salubrious climate, and with a lady,—well, with a lady whom other men infinitely wiser and more sophisticated than he have not found utterly devoid perhaps of interest and charm?"

Talk about being packed "cram-jam?" Surely no week-end suitcase could ever have bulged more with significance than did this one tiny telegram "Idjot!" And equally surely its context "dressed" the Young Doctor's 36mind quite completely for almost a week.

But the great square white envelope that arrived in due time from Mrs. Tome Gallien had nothing in it at all except a check. No reproaches, I mean, no upbraidings, no convalescent rhapsodies of gratitude even. Just a plain straightforward unsentimental black and white check covering so many professional visits at so much a visit. A man might have sent it. A perfectly well man, I mean.

"And so the episode ends," mused the Young Doctor with distinct satisfaction.

But it didn't end so, of course. Women like Mrs. Tome Gallien were not created to end things but to start 'em. Of such is the kingdom of Leaven.

It was on the following Thursday that the grand piano arrived at the Young Doctor's office.

Now the Young Doctor's office might easily have accommodated more patients than it did. But piano movers are almost always so fat. Puffing, blowing, swearing, tugging,—the whole dingy room seemed suddenly packed with brawn. 37

"But it isn't my piano!" protested the Young Doctor from every chair, desk, table, of his ultimate retreat. "It isn't my piano!" he yelled from the doorway. "It isn't my piano!" he scolded through the window.

But it was his piano, of course! The piano movers swore that it was. The piano warerooms telephoned that it was. . . Worst of all, the piano itself on one plump ankle flaunted a tag which proclaimed that it was. And the proclamation was most distinctly in Mrs. Tome Gallien's handwriting.

"For Dr. Sam Kendrue," it said. "As a slight token of my appreciation and esteem."

"'Appreciation?'" groaned the Young Doctor. "'Esteem?'" In the first venom of his emotion he sat right down and wrote Mrs. Gallien just exactly what he thought of her. And of it. "It" being of course the piano.

"Whatever in the world," he demanded, "would I do with a piano? Oh, of course it's very kind of you and all that," he conceded with crass sarcasm. "But I have no possible floor space, you understand, beyond my office and