But Wednesday goes by and nothing happens.  And Thursday morning dawns without even a word from the dentist saying that he has been called suddenly out of town to lecture before the Incisor Club.  Apparently, everything is working against you.

By this time, your tongue has taken up a permanent resting-place in the vacant tooth, and is causing you to talk indistinctly and incoherently.  Somehow you feel that if the dentist opens your mouth and finds the tip of your tongue in the tooth, he will be deceived and go away without doing anything.

The only thing left is for you to call him up and say that you have just killed a man and are being arrested and can’t possibly keep your appointment.  But any dentist would see through that.  He would laugh right into his transmitter at you.  There is probably no excuse which it would be possible to invent which a dentist has not already heard eighty or ninety times.  No, you might as well see the thing through now.

Luncheon is a ghastly rite.  The whole left side of your jaw has suddenly developed an acute sensitiveness and the disaffection has spread to the four teeth on either side of the original one.  You doubt if it will be possible for him to touch it at all.  Perhaps all he intends to do this time is to look at it anyway.  You might even suggest that to him.  You could very easily come in again soon and have him do the actual work.

Three-thirty draws near.  A horrible time of day at best.  Just when a man’s vitality is lowest.  Before stepping in out of the sunlight into the building in which the dental parlor is, you take one look about you at the happy people scurrying by in the street.  Carefree children that they are!  What do they know of Life?  Probably that man in the silly-looking hat never had trouble with so much as his baby-teeth.  There they go, pushing and jostling each other, just as if within ten feet of them there was not a man who stands on the brink of the Great Misadventure.  Ah well!  Life is like that!

Into the elevator.  The last hope is gone.  The door clangs and you look hopelessly about you at the stupid faces of your fellow passengers.  How can people be so clownish?  Of course, there is always the chance that the elevator will fall and that you will all be terribly hurt.  But that is too much to expect.  You dismiss it from your thoughts as too impractical, too visionary.  Things don’t work out as happily as that in real life.

You feel a certain glow of heroic pride when you tell the operator the right floor number.  You might just as easily have told him a floor too high or too low, and that would, at least, have caused delay.  But after all, a man must prove himself a man and the least you can do is to meet Fate with an unflinching eye and give the right floor number.