She heard her aunt admitting the doctor. She had never seen him when he was working before. With a curt greeting he strode past her and entered the sick-room. She stood in the doorway unnoticed.
"What's the temperature?"
"105."
There was a string of questions and answers given in an unemotional tone. They seemed almost flippant to Yetta, impious, in the face of the great tragedy. She felt hurt that he did not do something at once.
At last Liebovitz took off his hat and turned abruptly to the bed. After a moment's scrutiny of the patient's face, he turned down the covers. It seemed to Yetta that he was suddenly transformed into a pair of Hands. The rest of him melted away. His half-shut eyes were fixed blankly on the wall as his wonderful, infinitely sensitive hands played about Isadore's heart. Then he knelt down and became an Ear. His eyes were quite shut now, as he listened, listened—the intense strain of it showing on his rigid face—to the almost inaudible rumble of the battle raging within the sick man's chest. Then he straightened up, the mystic appearance left him; he became once more the ordinary, cold-blooded professional man.
"You've a telephone?" he asked the nurse. "Good. You can get Ripley any time this afternoon if you need some one quick. Call me up at the Post Graduate at five minutes to four. I've a lecture—till five. I can leave it if necessary. I'll come down right afterwards, anyhow."
Yetta tried to detain him in the hall to ask about the chances.
"Too busy to talk," he said. "Anyhow I'm no wizard. I can't prophesy. He's pretty sick. But he'll have to get a lot sicker before we let go. Really, I can't stop now. I've got a confinement, a T. B. test, and an operation before four."
Yetta went out into the kitchen and set her aunt to work getting supper for the nurse. Then, feeling suddenly very tired, she went to her room. But she could not sleep. The wonder of a doctor's life had caught her imagination. It dizzied her to try to realize what it must mean to rush, as Liebovitz was doing, from a desperate struggle with death to a childbirth.
Again and again the vision came back to her of Isadore's shrunken, pallid face.