“I had everything for a while. Then I lost the essential. When that happened I gave up. All a man in our profession has is a certain method, knowledge—call it what you like,—and faith in himself. I lost my self-confidence; that's all. Certain things happened; kept on happening. So I gave it up. That's all. It's not dramatic. For about a year I was damned sorry for myself. I've stopped whining now.”
“If every surgeon gave up because he lost cases—I've just told you I did your operation to-day. There was just a chance for the man, and I took my courage in my hands and tried it. The poor devil's dead.”
K. rose rather wearily and emptied his pipe over the balcony rail.
“That's not the same. That's the chance he and you took. What happened to me was—different.”
Pipe in hand, he stood staring out at the ailanthus tree with its crown of stars. Instead of the Street with its quiet houses, he saw the men he had known and worked with and taught, his friends who spoke his language, who had loved him, many of them, gathered about a bronze tablet set in a wall of the old college; he saw their earnest faces and grave eyes. He heard—
He heard the soft rustle of Sidney's dress as she came into the little room behind them.
CHAPTER XIII
A few days after Wilson's recognition of K., two most exciting things happened to Sidney. One was that Christine asked her to be maid of honor at her wedding. The other was more wonderful. She was accepted, and given her cap.
Because she could not get home that night, and because the little house had no telephone, she wrote the news to her mother and sent a note to Le Moyne: