“But this is the important thing:  Is he an honest doctor?”

“How do you mean ‘honest’?  Depends on what you mean.”

“Suppose you were sick.  Would you call him in?  Would you let me call him in?”

“Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn’t!  No, sir!  I wouldn’t have the old fake in the house.  Makes me tired, his everlasting palavering and soft-soaping.  He’s all right for an ordinary bellyache or holding some fool woman’s hand, but I wouldn’t call him in for an honest-to-God illness, not much I wouldn’t, no-sir!  You know I don’t do much back-biting, but same time——­I’ll tell you, Carrrie:  I’ve never got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. Jonderquist.  Nothing the matter with her, what she really needed was a rest, but Westlake kept calling on her and calling on her for weeks, almost every day, and he sent her a good big fat bill, too, you can bet!  I never did forgive him for that.  Nice decent hard-working people like the Jonderquists!”

In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau engaged in the invariable rites of wishing that she had a real dressing-table with a triple mirror, of bending toward the streaky glass and raising her chin to inspect a pin-head mole on her throat, and finally of brushing her hair.  In rhythm to the strokes she went on: 

“But, Will, there isn’t any of what you might call financial rivalry between you and the partners—­Westlake and McGanum—­is there?”

He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a ludicrous kick of his heels as he tucked his legs under the blankets.  He snorted, “Lord no!  I never begrudge any man a nickel he can get away from me—­fairly.”

“But is Westlake fair?  Isn’t he sly?”

“Sly is the word.  He’s a fox, that boy!”

She saw Guy Pollock’s grin in the mirror.  She flushed.

Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning: 

“Yump.  He’s smooth, too smooth.  But I bet I make prett’ near as much as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I’ve never wanted to grab more than my just share.  If anybody wants to go to the partners instead of to me, that’s his business.  Though I must say it makes me tired when Westlake gets hold of the Dawsons.  Here Luke Dawson had been coming to me for every toeache and headache and a lot of little things that just wasted my time, and then when his grandchild was here last summer and had summer-complaint, I suppose, or something like that, probably—­you know, the time you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt—­why, Westlake got hold of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think the kid had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum didn’t operate, and holler their heads off about the terrible adhesions they found, and what a regular Charley and Will Mayo they were for classy surgery.  They let on that if they’d waited two hours more the kid would have developed peritonitis, and God knows what all;