“The doctor says it’s a serious nervous collapse. They have shut me out of the room.”
“Can I do anything?”
“No.”
“Keep me posted, will you?”
“Yes.”
He had counted with everything but that—
He waited, eating himself up with suppressed fury; grew thin, unbearable in his impatience; he would have her; nothing could prevent it but—death!
4
The telephone rang in Dr. McClaren’s office. The doctor was breakfasting, but he didn’t enjoy as usual his porridge with cream and heavy black bread made by his Scotch housekeeper; his mind was elsewhere. He had been up a greater part of the night with young Mrs. Garrison, who went off from one fainting spell into another; she complained of intense pains in her head. He left her sleeping under bromides; she worried him. Dr. McClaren had lived forty years in New York; a gigantic man, with bushy, iron-gray hair and eyebrows, a noble head, keen, kind eyes.
His friends had advised him to “take out his papers”; he did, and paid his taxes honestly, but never voted. He couldn’t understand the political rings; he let them fight it out without help from him. Born in Edinburgh, he studied medicine at its excellent severe university, went to London to practice, starved there five years, then turned his back on an “ungrateful country” that refused an able doctor a living.