"Then for Heaven's sake—wish!" snapped the Young Doctor.
"Oh, my goodness!" mocked the Sick Woman. "You're not by any chance a—a fairy god-doctor, are you?"
"Fairy god-doctor?" bristled the young 3man. "The phrase is an unfamiliar one to me," he confided with some hauteur.
Quizzically then for a moment among her hotel pillows the woman lay staring out through the open window into the indefinite slate-roofed vista of Beyond—and Beyond—and Beyond. Then so furtively that the whites of her eyes showed suddenly like a snarling dog's she glanced back at the Young Doctor's grimly inscrutable face.
"You're quite sure that it isn't a will you want me to make? Not a wish?" she asked.
"Quite sure," said the Young Doctor, without emotion.
As two antagonists searching desperately for some weak spot in each other's mental armor, the patient's eyes narrowed to the doctor's, the doctor's to the patient's.
It was the patient who fled first from the probe.
"How many years can you give me?" she surrendered dully.
"I can't give you any! I can't afford it!" slapped the Young Doctor's brisk, cool voice.