“Real,” was the wrong word.  It was the red rag that started George raging, until to save her self-respect, Kate left the room.  Later in the day he announced that his mother was willing, she would clean the living room and move in that day.  How Kate hated the tiny room with its one exterior wall, only one small window, its scratched woodwork, and soiled paper, she could not say.  She felt physically ill when she thought of it, and when she thought of the heat of the coming summer, she wondered what she would do; but all she could do was to acquiesce.  She made a trip downtown and bought a quart of white paint and a few rolls of dainty, fresh paper.  She made herself ill with turpentine odours in giving the woodwork three coats, and fell from a table almost killing herself while papering the ceiling.  There was no room for her trunk; the closet would not hold half her clothes; her only easy chair was crowded out; she was sheared of personal comfort at a clip, just at a time when every comfort should have been hers.  George ordered an operating table, on which to massage his patients, a few other necessities, and in high spirits, went about fixing up his office and finishing his school.  He spent hours in the woodshed with the remainder of Kate’s white paint, making a sign to hang in front of the house.

He was so pathetically anxious for a patient, after he had put his table in place, hung up his sign, and paid for an announcement in the county paper and the little Walden sheet, that Kate was sorry for him.

On a hot July morning Mrs. Holt was sweeping the front porch when a forlorn specimen of humanity came shuffling up the front walk and asked to see Dr. Holt.  Mrs. Holt took him into the office and ran to the garden to tell George his first patient had come.  His face had been flushed from pulling weeds, but it paled perceptibly as he started to the back porch to wash his hands.

“Do you know who it is, Mother?” he asked.

“It’s that old Peter Mines,” she said, “an’ he looks fit to drop.”

“Peter Mines!” said George.  “He’s had about fifty things the matter with him for about fifty years.”

“Then you’re a made man if you can even make him think he feels enough better so’s he’ll go round talking about it,” said Mrs. Holt, shrewdly.

George stood with his hands dripping water an instant, thinking deeply.

“Well said for once, old lady,” he agreed.  “You are just exactly right.”

He hurried to his room, and put on his coat.

“A patient that will be a big boom for me,” he boasted to Kate as he went down the hall.

Mrs. Holt stood listening at the hall door.  Kate walked around the dining room, trying to occupy herself.  Presently cringing groans began to come from the room, mingling with George’s deep voice explaining, and trying to encourage the man.  Then came a wild shriek and then silence.  Kate hurried out to the back walk and began pacing up and down in the sunshine.  She did not know it, but she was praying.