1
The morning went on. It seemed as though there was to be no opportunity of telling Mr. Hancock until lunch had changed the feeling of the day. He knew there was something. Turning to select an instrument from a drawer she was at work upon he had caught sight of her mirth and smiled his amusement and anticipation into the drawer before turning gravely back to the chair. Perhaps that was enough, the best, like a moment of amusement you share with a stranger and never forget. Perhaps by the time she was able to tell him he would be disappointed. No. It was too perfect. Just the sort of thing that amused him.
He had one long sitting after another, the time given to one patient overlapping the appointment with the next so that her clearings and cleansings were done with a patient in the chair, noiselessly and slowly, keeping her in the room, making to-day seem like a continuation of yesterday afternoon. Yesterday shed its radiance. The shared mirth made a glowing background to her toil. The duties accumulating downstairs made her continued presence in the surgery a sort of truancy. She felt more strongly than ever the sense of her usefulness to him. She had never so far helped him so deftly and easily, being everywhere and nowhere, foreseeing his needs without impeding his movements, doing everything without reminding the patient that there was a third person in the room. She followed sympathetically the long slow processes of excavation and root treatment, the delicate shaping and undercutting of the walls of cavities, the adjustment and retention of the many appliances for the exclusion of moisture, the insertions of the amalgams and pastes whose pounding and mixing made a recurrent crisis in her morning. She wished again and again that the dentally ignorant dentally ironic world could see the operator at his best; in his moments of quiet intense concentration on giving his best to his patients.