All women liked him, and he liked them all.  He sent them books, marked essays in magazines for their individual consideration, took them to concerts, remembered their birthdays.  But his only close friends were men, the men with whom he played tennis and golf, or with whom he was associated in his work.

With all his cleverness and all his charm, Warren Gregory was not a romantic figure in the eyes of most women.  He had inherited from his old Irish mother a certain mildness, and a lenience, where they were concerned.  He neither judged them nor idolized them.  They belonged only to his leisure hours.  His real life was in his club, in his books, and in the hospital world where there were children’s tiny bones to set.  He was conscious, as a man born in a different circle always is conscious, that he had, by a series of pleasant chances, been pushed straight into the inner heart of the social group whose doors are so resolutely closed to many men and women, and he liked it.  His grand father had had blood but no money, his mother money but no social claim.  He inherited, with the O’Connell millions, the Gregory name, and for perhaps ten years he had enjoyed an unchallenged popularity.  He had inherited also, without knowing it, a definitely different standard from that held by all the men and women about him.  In his simple, unobtrusive way he held aloof from much that they said and did.  Greg, said the woman, was a regular Puritan about gossip, about drinking, about gambling.

They never suspected the truth:  that he was shy.  Sure of his touch as a surgeon, pleasantly definite about books and pictures, spontaneous and daring in the tennis court or on the links, under his friendly manner with women was the embarrassment of a young boy.

Before his tenth year his rigidly conscientious mother had instilled into the wondering little-boy mind certain mysterious yet positive moral laws.  Purity and self-control were in the air he breathed while at her side, and although a few years later school and college had claimed him, the effect of those early lessons was definite upon his character.  Diffidence and a sort of fear had protected him, far more effectually than any other means might have done, from the common vices of his age, and in those days a certain good-natured scorn from all his associates made him feel even more than his natural shyness, and marked him rather apart from other young men.

Keenly aware of this, it had been a tremendous surprise to the young physician, returning from post-graduate work in Germany a few years later, to find that what had once been considered a sort of laughable weakness in him was called strength of character now; that what had been a clumsy boy’s inarticulateness was more charitably construed into the silence of a clever man who will not waste his words; and that mothers whose sons he had once envied for their worldly wisdom were turning to him for advice as to the extrication of these same sons from all sorts of difficulties.