“We’re not straightened up yet, doctor,” they would say.

“Looks all right to me,” he would reply cheerfully, and cast an eager eye over the ward.  To him they were all his children, large and small, and if he did not exactly carry healing in his wings, having no wings, he brought them courage and a breath of fresh morning air, slightly tinged with bay rum, and the feeling that this was a new day.  A new page, on which to write such wonderful things (in the order book) as:  “Jennie may get up this afternoon.”  Or:  “Lizzie Smith, small piece of beef steak.”

On the morning after the election Doctor Smalley rose unusually early, and did five minutes of dumb bells, breathing very deep before his window, having started the cold water in the tub first.  At the end of that time he padded in his bare feet to the top of the stairs and called in a huge, deep-breathing voice: 

“Ten minutes.”

These two cryptic words seeming to be perfectly understood below, followed the sound of a body plunging into water, a prolonged “Wow!” from the bathroom, and noisy hurried splashing.  Dressing was a rapid process, due to a method learned during college days, which consists of wearing as little as possible, and arranging it at night so that two thrusts (trousers and under-drawers), one enveloping gesture (shirt and under-shirt), and a gymnastic effort of standing first on one leg and then on the other (socks and shoes), made a fairly completed toilet.

While putting on his collar and tie the doctor stood again by the window, and lustily called the garage across the narrow street.

“Jim!” he yelled.  “Annabelle breakfasted yet?”

Annabelle was his shabby little car.

Annabelle had breakfasted, on gasoline, oil and water.  The doctor finished tying his tie, singing lustily, and went to the door.  At the door he stopped singing, put on a carefully professional air, restrained an impulse to slide down the stairrail, and descended with the dignity of a man with a growing practice and a possible patient in the waiting-room.

At half-past seven he was on his way to the hospital.  He stopped at the market and bought three dozen oranges out of a ten-dollar bill he had won on the election, and almost bought a live rabbit because it looked so dreary in its slatted box.  He restrained himself, because his housekeeper had a weakness for stewed rabbit, and turned into Cardew Way.  He passed the Doyle house slowly, inspecting it as he went, because he had a patient there, and because he had felt that there was something mysterious about the household, quite aside from the saturnine Doyle himself.  He knew all about Doyle, of course; all, that is, that there was to know, but he was a newcomer to the city, and he did not know that Doyle’s wife was a Cardew.  Sometimes he had felt that he was under a sort of espionage all the time he was in the house.  But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?  Because they could not know that he was on the Vigilance Committee.