few thousand.  And yet he doesn’t want to be different from—­he wants to be just like—­the other fellow.  If some one in his line has a house up on the Hudson or on Riverside Drive, when he gets his money he wants to go there and live.  If the fellow in his line, or some other that he knows something about, belongs to a certain club, he has to belong to it even if the club doesn’t want him or he wouldn’t look well in it.  He wants to have the same tailor, the same grocer, smoke the same brand of cigars and go to the same summer resort as the other fellow.  They even want to look alike.  God!  And then when they’re just like every one else, they think they’re somebody.  They haven’t a single idea outside their line, and yet because they’ve made money they want to tell other people how to live and think.  Imagine a rich butcher or cloak-maker, or any one else, presuming to tell me how to think or live!”

He stared about him as though he saw many exemplifications of his picture present.  And it was always interesting to see how those whom his description really did fit look as though he could not possibly be referring to them.

Of all types or professions that came here, I think he disliked doctors most.  The reason was of course that the work they did or were about to do in the world bordered on that which he was trying to accomplish, and the chances were that they sniffed at or at least critically examined what he was doing with an eye to finding its weak spots.  In many cases no doubt he fancied that they were there to study and copy his methods and ideas, without having the decency later on to attribute their knowledge to him.  It was short shrift for any one of them with ideas or “notions” unfriendly to him advanced in his presence.  For a little while during my stay there was a smooth-faced, rather solid physically and decidedly self-opinionated mentally, doctor who ate at the same small table as I and who was never tired of airing his views, medical and otherwise.  He confided to me rather loftily that there was, to be sure, something to Culhane’s views and methods but that they were “over-emphasized here, over-emphasized.”  Still, one could over-emphasize the value of drugs too.  As for himself he had decided to achieve a happy medium if possible, and for this reason (for one) he had come here to study Culhane.

As for Culhane, in spite of the young doctor’s condescension and understanding, or perhaps better yet because of it, he thoroughly disliked, barely tolerated, him, and was never tired of commenting on little dancing medics with their “pill cases” and easily acquired book knowledge, boasting of their supposed learning “which somebody else had paid for,” as he once said—­their fathers, of course.  And when they were sick, some of them at least, they had to come out here to him, or they came to steal his theory and start a shabby grafting sanitarium of their own.  He knew them.