"Well, my friend," the doctor greeted him, staccato, with his characteristic faint, nervous snigger at the end of a phrase.
"You're here very early, doctor," said Mr. Earlforward composedly. "At least it seems to me early." He did not know the time; nor Elsie either; not a timepiece in the house was going, and the church-clock bell was too familiar to be noticed unless listened for.
"Thought you might like to know something about your wife," said Dr. Raste, raising his voice. He made no reference at all to Henry's exasperating refusal to go to the hospital on the previous day. "They tell me at the hospital that a fibroid growth is her trouble. I suspected it."
"Where?"
"Matrix." The doctor glanced at Elsie as if to say: "You don't know what that word means." She didn't, but she divined well enough Mrs. Earlforward's trouble. "Change of life. No children," the doctor went on tersely, and nodded several times. Mr. Earlforward merely gazed at him with his little burning eyes. "There'll be an operation this morning. Hope it'll be all right. It ought to be. An otherwise healthy subject. Yes. Hold this in your mouth, will you?"
He inserted a clinical thermometer between Mr. Earlforward's white, crinkled lips, took hold of the patient's wrist and pulled out his watch.
"Appears you can't retain your food," he said, after he had put the watch back. "Comes up exactly as it goes down. Mechanical. You're very strong." He withdrew the thermometer, held it up to the light, washed it, restored it to its case. "Well, we know what's the matter with your wife, but I shouldn't like to say what's the matter with you—yet. I'm not a specialist." He uttered the phrase with a peculiar intonation, not entirely condemning specialists, but putting them in their place, regarding them very critically and rather condescendingly, as befitting one whose field of work and knowledge was the whole boundless realm of human pathology. "You'll have to be put under observation, watched for a bit, and X-rayed. You can't possibly be nursed properly here, though I'm sure Elsie's doing her best. And there's another great advantage of your being in hospital. You'll know how Mrs. Earlforward's going on. You can't expect 'em to be sending up here every ten minutes to tell you. Nor telegraph either. Something else to do, hospitals have!" Another faint snigger. "If you'll come now, I mean in half an hour or so, I've arranged to get you there in comfort. It's all fixed." (He did not say how.) "I hear you can walk about, and you made your bed yesterday. Now, Elsie, you must——"
"I won't go to the hospital," Mr. Earlforward coldly interrupted him. "I don't mind having a private nurse here. But I won't go to the hospital."
The doctor laughed easily.
"Oh, but you must! And one nurse wouldn't be enough. You'll need two. And even then it would be absolutely no good. You can't be X-rayed here, for instance. It's no use me telling you how ill you are, because you know as well as I do how ill you are."