DR. POLNITZSKI
“So you think,” Dr. Polnitzski said, smiling rather satirically, “that you are really tasting the bitterness of life?”
“I did n’t say anything of the sort,” I retorted impatiently. “I was n’t making anything so serious of it; but you’ll own that to be thrown over your horse’s head on a stake that rips a gash six inches long in your thigh is n’t precisely amusing.”
“Oh, quite the contrary,” he answered. “I’m prepared to admit so much.”
“In the very middle of the hunting season, too,” I went on, “and at the house of a friend. More than that, a man never gets over the feeling that everybody secretly thinks an accident must be his own fault and he a duffer. Even Lord Eldon, who’s good nature itself and no end of a jolly host, must think—”
“Nonsense,” my physician interrupted brusquely, “Lord Eldon is not a fool, and he realizes that this was n’t your fault as well as you do yourself. You take the whole thing so hard because you’ve evidently never come in contact with the realities of life.”
He was so magnificent a man as he stood there that the brusqueness of his words was easily forgiven; he had been so unremitting in his care ever since, in the illness of Lord Eldon’s family physician, he had been called in on the occasion of my accident, that I had become genuinely attached to him. Our acquaintance had ripened into something almost like intimacy, since my host and his family had been unexpectedly called from home by the illness of a married daughter, and it had come to be the usual thing for Dr. Polnitzski to pass with me the evenings of my slow convalescence, which would otherwise have been so intolerably tedious.
“I dare say I’ve been too much babied most of my life,” I returned; “but a month of this sort of thing is pretty serious for anybody.”
He smiled, then his face grew grave.