wl round her face had battled gallantly along
shouting through her shawl. Miriam had made out nothing clearly, but the
fact that the dentist's wife had a title in her own right. Gertrude had
gone through her trial, prolonged by some slight complication, without
an anesthetic, in alternations of tense silence and great gusts of her
hacking laughter. Miriam, sitting strained in the far background near
a screen covered with a mass of strange embroideries, wondered how
she really felt. That, she realised with a vision of Gertrude going on
through life in smart costumes, one would never know.

9

The thing Miriam dreaded most acutely was a visit with Minna to her
aurist. She learned with horror that Minna was obliged every few months
to submit to a series of small operations at the hands of the tall,
scholarly-looking man, with large, clear, impersonal eyes, who carried
on his practice high up in a great block of buildings in a small faded
room with coarse coffee-coloured curtains at its smudgy windows. The
character of his surroundings added a great deal to her abhorrence of
his attentions to Minna.

The room was densely saturated with an odour which she guessed to be
that of stale cigar-smoke. It seemed so tangible in the room that she
looked about at first for visible signs of its presence. It was like an
invisible fog and seemed to affect her breathing.

Coming and going upon the dense staleness of the room and pervading the
immediate premises was a strange savoury pungency. Miriam could not at
first identify it. But as the visits multiplied and she noticed the same
odour standing in faint patches here and there about the stairways
and corridors of the block, it dawned upon her that it must be
onions--onions freshly frying but with a quality of accumulated richness
that she could not explain. But the fact of the dominating kitchen side
by side with the consulting-room made her speculate. She imagined the
doctor's wife, probably in that kitchen, a hard-browed bony North
German woman. She saw the clear-eyed man at his meals; and imagined his
slippers. There were dingy books in the room where Minna started and
moaned.

She compared this entourage with her recollection of her one visit to an
oculist in Harley Street. His stately house, the exquisite freshness of
his appointments and his person stood out now. The English she assured
herself were more refined than the Germans. Even the local doctor at
Barnes whose