m to lag a foot behind other people.

Hence the day on which he would be free to dismiss the subject of money
from his mind seemed as far off as ever. He might indulge wild schemes
of taking assistant or partner; the plain truth was, he could not
afford even the sum needed to settle in a LOCUM TENENS for three
months, while he recuperated.--Another and equally valid reason was
that the right man for a LOCUM was far to seek. As time went on, he
found himself pushed more and more into a single branch of
medicine--one, too, he had never meant to let grow over his head in
this fashion. For it was common medical knowledge out here that, given
the distances and the general lack of conveniences, thirty to forty
maternity cases per year were as much as a practitioner could with
comfort take in hand. HIS books for the past year stood at over a
hundred! The nightwork this meant was unbearable, infants showing a
perverse disinclination to enter the world except under cover of the
dark.

His popularity--if such it could be called--with the other sex was
something of a mystery to him. For he had not one manner for the
bedside and another for daily life. He never sought to ingratiate
himself with people, or to wheedle them; still less would he stoop to
bully or intimidate; was always by preference the adviser rather than
the dictator. And men did not greatly care for this arm's-length
attitude; they wrote him down haughty and indifferent, and pinned their
faith to a blunter, homelier manner. But with women it was otherwise;
and these also appreciated the fact that, no matter what their rank in
life, their age or their looks, he met them with the deference he
believed due to their sex. Exceptions there were, of course.
Affectation or insincerity angered him--with the "Zaras" of this world
he had scant patience--while among the women themselves, some
few--Ned's wife, for example--felt resentment at his very appearance,
his gestures, his tricks of speech. But the majority were his staunch
partisans; and it was becoming more and more the custom to engage Dr.
Mahony months ahead, thus binding him fast. And though he would
sometimes give Mary a fright by vowing that he was going to "throw up
mid. and be done with it," yet her ambition--and what an ambitious wife
she was, no one but himself knew--that he should some day become one of
the leading specialists on Ballarat, seemed not unlikely of fulfilment.
If his health kept good. And ... a