“Yes, dear, presently.  He never fails.”

The girl closed her eyes again, and there was silence.  The dim rays of the lamp, falling upon the doctor, revealed the figure of a woman of less than medium size, perhaps of the age of thirty or more, a plain little body, you would have said, who paid the slightest possible attention to her dress, and when she went about the city was not to be distinguished from a working-woman.  Her friends, indeed, said that she had not the least care for her personal appearance, and unless she was watched, she was sure to go out in her shabbiest gown and most battered hat.  She wore tonight a brown ulster and a nondescript black bonnet drawn close down on her head and tied with black strings.  In her lap lay her leathern bag, which she usually carried under her arm, that contained medicines, lint, bandages, smelling-salts, a vial of ammonia, and so on; to her patients it was a sort of conjurer’s bag, out of which she could produce anything that an emergency called for.

Dr. Leigh was not in the least nervous or excited.  Indeed, an artist would not have painted her as a rapt angelic visitant to this abode of poverty.  This contact with poverty and coming death was quite in her ordinary experience.  It would never have occurred to her that she was doing anything unusual, any more than it would have occurred to the objects of her ministrations to overwhelm her with thanks.  They trusted her, that was all.  They met her always with a pleasant recognition.  She belonged perhaps to their world.  Perhaps they would have said that “Dr. Leigh don’t handsome much,” but their idea was that her face was good.  That was what anybody would have said who saw her tonight, “She has such a good face;” the face of a woman who knew the world, and perhaps was not very sanguine about it, had few illusions and few antipathies, but accepted it, and tried in her humble way to alleviate its hardships, without any consciousness of having a mission or making a sacrifice.

Dr. Leigh—­Miss Ruth Leigh—­was Edith’s friend.  She had not come from the country with an exalted notion of being a worker among the poor about whom so much was written; she had not even descended from some high circle in the city into this world, moved by a restless enthusiasm for humanity.  She was a woman of the people, to adopt a popular phrase.  From her childhood she had known them, their wants, their sympathies, their discouragements; and in her heart—­though you would not discover this till you had known her long and well—­there was a burning sympathy with them, a sympathy born in her, and not assumed for the sake of having a career.  It was this that had impelled her to get a medical education, which she obtained by hard labor and self-denial.  To her this was not a means of livelihood, but simply that she might be of service to those all about her who needed help more than she did.  She didn’t believe in charity, this stout-hearted, clearheaded little woman; she meant to make everybody pay for her medical services who could pay; but somehow her practice was not lucrative, and the little salary she got as a dispensary doctor melted away with scarcely any perceptible improvement in her own wardrobe.  Why, she needed nothing, going about as she did.