bout the city was not to be
distinguished from a working-woman. Her friends, indeed, said that she
had not the least care for her personal appearance, and unless she was
watched, she was sure to go out in her shabbiest gown and most battered
hat. She wore tonight a brown ulster and a nondescript black bonnet
drawn close down on her head and tied with black strings. In her lap
lay her leathern bag, which she usually carried under her arm, that
contained medicines, lint, bandages, smelling-salts, a vial of ammonia,
and so on; to her patients it was a sort of conjurer's bag, out of which
she could produce anything that an emergency called for.

Dr. Leigh was not in the least nervous or excited. Indeed, an artist
would not have painted her as a rapt angelic visitant to this abode of
poverty. This contact with poverty and coming death was quite in her
ordinary experience. It would never have occurred to her that she was
doing anything unusual, any more than it would have occurred to the
objects of her ministrations to overwhelm her with thanks. They trusted
her, that was all. They met her always with a pleasant recognition. She
belonged perhaps to their world. Perhaps they would have said that "Dr.
Leigh don't handsome much," but their idea was that her face was good.
That was what anybody would have said who saw her tonight, "She has such
a good face;" the face of a woman who knew the world, and perhaps was
not very sanguine about it, had few illusions and few antipathies, but
accepted it, and tried in her humble way to alleviate its hardships,
without any consciousness of having a mission or making a sacrifice.

Dr. Leigh--Miss Ruth Leigh--was Edith's friend. She had not come from
the country with an exalted notion of being a worker among the poor
about whom so much was written; she had not even descended from some
high circle in the city into this world, moved by a restless enthusiasm
for humanity. She was a woman of the people, to adopt a popular phrase.
From her childhood she had known them, their wants, their sympathies,
their discouragements; and in her heart--though you would not discover
this till you had known her long and well--there was a burning sympathy
with them, a sympathy born in her, and not assumed for the sake of
having a career. It was this that had impelled her to get a medical
education, which she obtained by hard labor and self-denial. To her this
was not a means of livelihood, but simply that she mig