“When shall I come again?”
“Oh, er—next week!”
She got up with another sigh, and straightened her hat.
“What’s your fee, doctor?” she asked.
He turned scarlet; the idea of taking money from this poor vulgar, suffering soul disgusted him, shamed him. And suppose he weren’t helping her at all?
“Two dollars,” he muttered.
She laid a limp bill on the table, and went out.
III
In the next six months he had just seven patients. Summer was coming on again, and they hadn’t a penny. He himself was shabby and cowed, the little girl was so ragged that the neighbours’ children were told to avoid her. Minnie was reduced to big aprons. They were hungry and wretched, hounded by creditors, suffering from the intolerable restraints of poverty. Lionel hadn’t even cigarettes. He pulled down the sign and went about looking for work again. Without success. He was the least desirable sort of worker there was. He had little physical strength, no manual ability, a faulty and useless education, and an unconsciously haughty and repellent manner. He went about exuding failure; he was shabby, gloomy and resentful. He knew he wasn’t any good.
At the very end, on the brink of ruin, he did get a job, addressing envelopes for a big directory. There he sat, hour after hour, writing away, surrounded by a heart-breaking collection of human wrecks, men who terrified him by their sinister incarnation of his own future. Old men, with broken shoes and no overcoats, with fawning smiles and drink-reddened noses, middle-aged men who had finished with life, still genteel, but fatally resigned.