He looked at me a little doubtfully, but I could see that, on the whole, he was pleased with my decision.  I went into the hall and knocked loudly on the door.  There was no response.  I kicked it till I must have been heard all over the house, but still there was no response.  It was now clear I should not enter by invitation, so I went up four or five stairs of the flight opposite the door and from that position sprang against it.  I am not, if you remember, a heavy man, but momentum is MV and I made up in the ‘V’ what I lacked in the ‘M.’  The door opened inwardly, and I tore it from its hinges and precipitated both myself and it into the centre of the apartment.  As I look back upon this incident I regard it as the most precipitous thing I ever did in the way of a professional visit.  If the young lady started at all, she did so before I had gathered myself together sufficiently to notice it.  I spoke to her, but she gave no evidence of hearing me.  I raised her head.  Her eyes were wide open and stared full at me, yet in such a blank way that I knew she did not hear me.  The contraction of the brows, the knotted appearance of the forehead, and the rigor of the face told me she was under an all-but-breaking tension.  There were tear-stains from tears which long since had ceased to flow.  The fire of fever had dried them up.  I regarded her case as far more desperate than Gwen’s and determined to lose no time in taking charge of it.  It seemed to me so like sacrilege to touch her without an explanation that, though I knew she could not understand me, I said to her, as I took her in my arms.  “You are ill, and I must take you away from here.”

She was just blossoming into womanhood and her form had that exquisite roundness and grace which it is the particular function of fashion to annihilate.  If I held her closely, I think all bachelors will agree that it was because this very roundness made her heavy; if I did not put her down immediately I reached Maitland’s room, it is because, as a doctor of medicine, I have my own ideas as to how a couch should be fixed before a patient is laid upon it.  Maitland may say what he pleases, but I know how important these things are in sickness, and you know, quick as he is in most things, George has moments when his head is so much in the clouds that he doesn’t know what he is doing, and moves as if he were in a dream set to dirge music.  He kept telling me to “put her on the couch! —­put her on the couch!” To this day, he fondly believes that when I finally did release her, it was as the result of his advice, rather than because he had at last made a suitable bed for her.