“She hasn’t got it, doctor, has she?”

“I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it.”

“She was the last one.  When she goes I shan’t have anybody.”

She began to cry, while the doctor looked at her gravely; he thought she too had the type; she would not make old bones either.  The girl turned round and saw her sister’s tears.  She understood what they meant.  The colour fled from her lovely face and tears fell down her cheeks.  The two stood for a minute or two, crying silently, and then the older, forgetting the indifferent crowd that watched them, went up to her, took her in her arms, and rocked her gently to and fro as if she were a baby.

When they were gone a student asked: 

“How long d’you think she’ll last, sir?”

Dr. Tyrell shrugged his shoulders.

“Her brother and sister died within three months of the first symptoms.  She’ll do the same.  If they were rich one might do something.  You can’t tell these people to go to St. Moritz.  Nothing can be done for them.”

Once a man who was strong and in all the power of his manhood came because a persistent aching troubled him and his club-doctor did not seem to do him any good; and the verdict for him too was death, not the inevitable death that horrified and yet was tolerable because science was helpless before it, but the death which was inevitable because the man was a little wheel in the great machine of a complex civilisation, and had as little power of changing the circumstances as an automaton.  Complete rest was his only chance.  The physician did not ask impossibilities.

“You ought to get some very much lighter job.”

“There ain’t no light jobs in my business.”

“Well, if you go on like this you’ll kill yourself.  You’re very ill.”

“D’you mean to say I’m going to die?”

“I shouldn’t like to say that, but you’re certainly unfit for hard work.”

“If I don’t work who’s to keep the wife and the kids?”

Dr. Tyrell shrugged his shoulders.  The dilemma had been presented to him a hundred times.  Time was pressing and there were many patients to be seen.

“Well, I’ll give you some medicine and you can come back in a week and tell me how you’re getting on.”

The man took his letter with the useless prescription written upon it and walked out.  The doctor might say what he liked.  He did not feel so bad that he could not go on working.  He had a good job and he could not afford to throw it away.

“I give him a year,” said Dr. Tyrell.

Sometimes there was comedy.  Now and then came a flash of cockney humour, now and then some old lady, a character such as Charles Dickens might have drawn, would amuse them by her garrulous oddities.  Once a woman came who was a member of the ballet at a famous music-hall.  She looked fifty, but gave her age as twenty-eight.  She was outrageously painted and ogled the students impudently with large black eyes; her smiles were grossly alluring.  She had abundant self-confidence and treated Dr. Tyrell, vastly amused, with the easy familiarity with which she might have used an intoxicated admirer.  She had chronic bronchitis, and told him it hindered her in the exercise of her profession.