"So it's a bad world this morning, eh?" the doctor quizzed in an indulgent voice. "We'll try to make it better,—shake up the combination." He broke off suddenly and remarked in an ordinary, conversational voice: "Your friend Mrs. Woodyard was in here this morning,—a clever woman! My, but she is clever!"
"What is the matter with her?"
"Same thing,—Americanitis; but she'll pull out if she will give herself half a chance."
Then he returned to Isabelle, wrote her a prescription, talked to her for ten minutes, and when she left the office she felt better, was sure it would "all come out right."
The great Dr. Potts! He served as God to several hundred neurasthenic women. Born in a back street of a small town, he had emerged into the fashionable light after prodigious labor and exercise of will. Physically he stood six feet, with a heavy head covered with thick black hair, and deep-set black eyes. He had been well educated professionally, but his training, his medical attainments, had little to do with his success. He had the power to look through the small souls of his women patients, and he found generally Fear, and sometimes Hypocrisy,—a desire to evade, to get pleasure and escape the bill. These he bullied. Others he found struggling, feeble of purpose, desiring light, willingly confessing their weakness, and begging for strength. These he despised; he gave them drugs and flattered them. There were some, like Conny, who were perfectly poised, with a plain philosophy of selfishness. These he understood, being of fellow clay, and plotted with them how to entrap what they desired.
Power! That was Potts's keynote,—power, effectiveness, accomplishment, at any and all cost. He was the spirit of the city, nay of the country itself! "Results—get results at all costs," that was the one lesson of life which he had learned from the back street, where luckier men had shouldered him…. "I must supply backbone," he would say to his patients. "I am your temporary dynamo!"
To Isabelle this mass of energy, Dr. Alexander Potts, seemed like the incarnate will to live of the great city. After her visit at his office she came out into the sharp air, the shrill discords of the busy streets, attuned—with purpose,—"I am going to be well now! I am going to do this. Life will arrange itself, and at last I shall be able to live as others live." This borrowed purpose might last the day out, and she would plunge into a dozen matters; or it might wear off in an hour or two. Then back she went the next day to be keyed up once more.
"Do something! Deliver the goods, no matter what goods or how you get them into the premises!" Potts thundered, beating the desk in the energy of his lecture. "Live! That's what we must all do. Never mind how you live,—don't waste good tissue worrying over that. Live!"
Dr. Potts was an education to Isabelle. His moods of brutality and of sympathy came like the shifting shadows of a gusty day. His perfectly material philosophy frightened her and allured her. He was Mephistopheles,—one hand on the medicine chest of life, the other pointing satirically towards the towered city.
"See, my child," he purred; "I will tinker this little toy of your body for you; then run along down there and play with your brothers and sisters."