Frederick and Peter confirmed Mrs. Schmidt’s diagnosis, and Mrs. Schmidt told the candidate for the grave, who was so gay and unsuspecting, that she might have to undergo a slight operation.  She inquired kindly for her husband and her child, who had come into the world three months before with her help, and the woman gave ready answers in the best of spirits.  Peter took it upon himself to acquaint her husband the very same day with her condition.

During the next week, Peter drew his friend more and more into his practice.  Frederick found a certain grim attraction in it.  It was a strange treadmill, set in a world of everlasting suffering and dying, in a subterranean stratum of life, having nothing in common with that deceptive existence of a comparatively happy superficiality which he had been able to lead in New York.  The Schmidts were doing hard service requiring the utmost self-renunciation.  They received no greater compensation than enabled them to obtain sufficient food, clothing and shelter to be able to continue in that service.  Though Peter Schmidt was not a Socialist, his practice was almost exclusively confined to the working class.  Most of the two doctors’ clients were poor immigrants with large families, who toiled laboriously in the Britannia-metal factories to keep the wolf from the door.  Their fees were extremely low, and in half the cases Peter, true to his views of life, did not collect them.

The section of the city in which their office was located was dismal beyond parallel.  A factory with its offices took up a whole block.  Though Frederick was well acquainted with the corrosive sublimate and carbolic acid smell of consultation rooms, he nevertheless had difficulty in concealing the depressing effect the Schmidts’ home had upon him.  It was dark and gloomy, and the street noises came in directly from the windows.  In Germany, a city of thirty thousand inhabitants is dead.  This American city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants raced and rushed, rang bells, rattled and clattered and raved like mad.  Nobody had a moment’s time.  Everybody hurried past everybody else.  No question of joy in life here.  If a man lived in Meriden, he lived there to work.  If a man worked in Meriden, he worked for the sake of the dollars that had the power finally to free him from that environment and introduce him to a period of enjoyment.  Most of the people, especially the German and Polish workmen and tradesmen, saw in the life they were compelled to lead a temporary, provisional existence, a condition the bitterness of which was intensified when return to the home country was cut off by sins committed in the past or by expulsion and banishment.  From psychologic interest, Frederick had entered into conversation with patients in the waiting-room and had already learned of sad cases of men having been ejected from their country and left without a home.

Mrs. Schmidt was a Swiss.  She had a broad German head, straight, finely chiselled nose, and a figure like the figures of the women of Basel that Holbein painted.