on
that day Corinne Garland wilted abruptly in the sickening heat, and her
tall machine at the Heth Works stood silent after three P.M....

Kern came home and went to bed, and suddenly all the current of life in
the Dabney House was changed. It was after five when Mr. V.V., returning
from his rounds, heard the news, with a tightening feeling around his
heart, and went down the long hall to see her.

The little girl lay silent, with feverish cheeks, and did not make a
game of sticking out her tongue, which was certainly a bad symptom.
However, Kern was sensitive with Mr. V.V.; she didn't like to answer his
questions, wouldn't tell the truth in fact. It took a grizzled gentleman
from the other end of town, Dr. Halstead, late physician to Mr.
Armistead Beirne, to fix the diagnosis beyond doubt. Typhoid, said he,
confirming the first impression of his learned young colleague. Kern
Garland had typhoid.

Well, it wasn't her lungs, at any rate, objects of suspicion since the
pleurisy in January. Only--only--how had she ever been allowed to stay
on at the Works so long?...

The little girl had also a nervous constitution, hardly fitted for
weathering many gales. So observed the grizzled visitor, aside. And,
glancing about the poor room with its sway-backed double bed, he advised
that she be sent off to a hospital without delay, and so smiled cheerily
at the small patient and went chugging back to his handsome house on
Washington Street, having pooh-poohed all mention of a fee.

But Kern cried bitterly at the threat of a hospital, and Mr. V.V.
instantly promised that she shouldn't stir a foot from where he was. He
didn't mean that she should suffer by it, either. But it would be a
strange thing if he, a resident physician with the riches of the world
behind him (practically speaking), could not do all that a hospital
could do, and perhaps that little more beside that might make all the
difference....

There followed a day of intense activity, and at the end of that
time--behold the power of money in the bank, so decried by
transcendentalists.

Mrs. Garland slept alone in a new room containing the sway-backed double
bed, and (to tell the truth) not one earthly thing besides. Kern slept
in a brand-new single bed of white iron, new-mattressed and sheeted, and
not far away stood another bed exactly like it. Beside Kern's bed stood
a table holding glasses and bottled milk and thermometer and cracked ice
and charts and liquid