cy into the buggy, and
bid her good-by. He seemed about to question him, then he took another
puff at his pipe, and his face settled into its wonted expression of
gloomy retrospection. Boy's and girl's love affairs seemed as motes in a
beam of sunlight to him at this juncture.

James started to go, the horses were stamping uneasily in the drive, and
he had a long round of calls to make that afternoon.

Gordon removed his pipe. "I am putting a good deal on you, Elliot," he
said with a kind of hard sadness.

"That's all right," James replied cheerfully, "I am strong. I can stand
it if the patients can. I fancied old Mrs. Steen was rather disgusted to
see me this morning. I heard her say something about sendin' a boy to
her daughter, and when I went into the bedroom, she glared at me, and
said, 'You?'" James laughed.

"Her case is not at all desperate," Gordon said gloomily. "She is merely
on the downward road of life. Nothing ails her except that. You can
supply the few inadequate crutches of tonics as well as any one. There
is not one desperately sick patient on the whole list now, that I know
of, although I must confess that that Willoughby girl rather puzzles me.
She breaks every diagnosis all to pieces."

"Hysteria," said James.

"Oh, yes, I know hysteria is a good way to account for our own lack of
insight," said Gordon, "and it may be that girls are queer subjects.
Sometimes I wonder if they know what they know. Lilian Willoughby does
not."

Gordon, to James's intense surprise, flared into a burst of anger. "Yes,
she does know," he declared. "Down in her inner consciousness I believe
she does, poor little overstrung, oversensitive girl, half-fed, as to
her body, on coarse food which she cannot assimilate, starved
emotionally. If a girl like that has to exist anyway, why cannot she be
born under different circumstances? That girl as daughter of a New
Jersey farmer is an anomaly. If she mates at all it must be with another
New Jersey farmer, then she dies after bringing a few degenerates into
the world. Providence does things like that, and the doctors are
supposed to right things. That girl has had symptoms of about every
known disease, and my diagnosis has failed to prove the existence of one
of them. Yet there are the symptoms. Call it hysteria, or what you will.
I call it an injustice on the part of the Higher Power. I suppose that
is blasphemy, but I am forced to it. Can that girl help the longings
for h