"You won't mind it a mite," said Aunt Jane. Her hand held the thin one in its warm clasp. "You won't mind.... Dr. Doty'll give it to you, nice. He's about the best one we've got—to give it."
The doctor smiled at the words—a boyish, whimsical smile at flattery. He adjusted the cone a little. "Breathe deep," he said gently.
There was silence in the room—only a little burring sound somewhere, and the soft creak of Aunt Jane's rockers as they moved to and fro.
The door of the operating-room stood open. Through the crack Aunt Jane could see a round, stout figure, enveloped from head to foot in its rubber apron, bending over a tray of instruments. The great arms, bare to the shoulders, the exposed neck, and round head with short bristling hair, a little bald at the top, gave a curious sense of alert power and force.
Aunt Jane had never seen a picture of St. George and the Dragon, or of St. Michael. She had scant material for comparison. But I suspect if she had seen through the open door of the operating-room, either of these saints fastening on his greaves—whatever greaves may be—and getting ready for the dragon, he would have seemed to her a less heroic and noble and beautiful figure than the short, square man, bending over his case of instruments and selecting a particularly sharp and glittering one for use.
The young doctor leaning over the figure on the couch moved a little and lifted his head. "All right," he said quietly. He nodded toward the door of the operating-room.
A nurse appeared in the doorway.
Aunt Jane pushed back her chair; and the nurse and doctor, at either end, lifted the movable top of the couch by its handles and carried the light burden easily between them to the open door.
Aunt Jane watched till the door was shut.... Her work began and ended at the door of the operating-room.
Inside that door, Dr. Carmon was supreme. Elsewhere in the hospital Aunt Jane might treat him as a mere man; she might criticise and advise, and even rebuke the surgeon for whose use the hospital had been built and endowed. But within the operating-room he was supreme. She allowed patients to enter that door without word or comment, and she received them back from his hands with a childlike humility that went a long way—it may be—toward reconciling the surgeon to her rule elsewhere.