orkers, in which one, a teamster with Bright's disease and seven
children, remained long....

These matters occupied the doctor till eight o'clock: alone in his
office he computed the fact roughly from his watch, a battered heirloom
whose word was not to be taken literally. Good!--half an hour before
time to dress. Leisure, being a scant commodity, was proportionally
valued. The young man advanced to his secretary, before whose open face
plain living and high thinking could be so freely indulged in.

The secretary was of fine mahogany, hand-made in Virginia in the year
that Sir Edward Pakenham did not take New Orleans. It was the hero of so
many travels that its present proprietor once called it a
field-secretary, a pleasantry which would doubtless have convulsed Miss
Mamie Willis, if only she had ever heard it. The great tall office, bare
but for cheap doctorly paraphernalia, was even more storied. A bleak
grandeur clung to it still. Decayed mouldings, it had aplenty: great
splotches on wall and ceiling, where plaster had been tried through the
year and found wanting; unsightlier splotch between the windows whence
the tall gilt mirror had been plucked away for cash; broken chandelier,
cracked panes, loose flooring, dismantled fireplace. But view the
stately high pitch of the chamber, the majestic wide windows and private
balcony without, the tall mantel of pure black marble, the still
handsome walnut paneling, waist-high, the massive splendid doors. No
common suburban room, this: clearly a room with meaning, a past, soul.

The look was not deceptive. Royalty had on a time sat in this room: here
granted audience to the great's higher circle, of greatness; there,
beyond that door, nowadays admitting ragged sufferers from a
fourth-class "waiting-room," slept in state with doubtless royal snores.
This, in fact, was the old Dabney House's famous "state suite," Vivian's
office the culminating grand sitting-room, the building art's best in
the '40s. A famous hostelry the Dabney House had been in its day, the
chosen foregathering-place of notabilities now long dusted to the common
level. Hither had trooped the gallant and the gay, the knight in his
pride and beauty in her power, great statesmen and greater belles, their
lovers and their sycophants. Here, in the memorable ball still talked of
by silvered ladies of an elder day, the Great Personage had trod his
measure with peerless Mary Marshall.

A great history had the Dab