Modestly like some other successful authors the Little Girl flapped her eyelids languidly open and shut for three or four times before she acknowledged the compliment.  “Oh, cunning as any of ’em,” she admitted off-handishly.  Only once again did she open either mouth or eyes, and this time it was merely one eye and half a mouth.  “Do my fat iron braces—­hurt you?” she mumbled drowsily.

“Yes, a little,” conceded the White Linen Nurse.

“Ha!  They hurt me—­all the time!” gibed the Little Girl.

Five minutes later, the child who didn’t particularly care about being held, and the girl who didn’t particularly care about holding her, were fast asleep in each other’s arms,—­a naughty, nagging, restive little hornet all hushed up and a-dream in the heart of a pink wild-rose!

Stalking out of the house in his own due time the Senior Surgeon reared back aghast at the sight.

“Well—­I’ll be hanged!” he muttered.  “Most everlastingly hanged!  Wonder what they think this is?  A somnolent kindergarten show?  Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!”

Awkwardly, on the top step, he struggled alone into his cumbersome coat.  Every tingling nerve in his body, every shuddering sensibility, was racked to its utmost capacity over the distressing scenes he had left behind him in the big house.  Back in that luxuriant sickroom, Youth Incarnate lay stripped, root, branch, leaf, bud, blossom, fruit, of All its manhood’s promise.  Back in that erudite library, Culture Personified, robbed of all its fine philosophy, sat babbling illiterate street-curses into its quivering hands.  Back in that exquisite pink and gold boudoir, Blonded Fashion, ravished for once of all its artistry, ran stumbling round and round in interminable circles like a disheveled hag.  In shrill crescendos and discordant basses, with heartpiercing jaggedness, with blood-curdling raspishness, each one, boy, father, mother, meddlesome relative, competent or incompetent assistant, indiscriminate servant, filing his separate sorrow into the Senior Surgeon’s tortured ears!

With one of those sudden revulsions to materialism which is liable to overwhelm any man who delves too long at a time in the brutally unconventional issues of life and death, the Senior Surgeon stepped down into the subtle, hyacinth-scented sunshine with every latent human greed in his body clamoring for expression—­before it, too, should be hurtled into oblivion.  “Eat, you fool, and drink, you fool, and be merry,—­you fool,—­for to-morrow—­even you,—­Lendicott R. Faber—­may have to die!” brawled and re-brawled through his mind like a ribald phonograph tune.

At the edge of the bottom step a precipitous lilac branch that must have budded and bloomed in a single hour smote him stingingly across his cheek.  “Laggard!” taunted the lilac branch.