As they rode up to Chicago Martin thought aloud:
“I never knew I could be so badly licked. I never want to see a laboratory or a public health office again. I’m done with everything but making money.
“I suppose this Rouncefield Clinic is probably nothing but a gilded boob-trap—scare the poor millionaire into having all the fancy kinds of examinations and treatments the traffic will bear. I hope it is! I expect to be a commercial-group doctor the rest of my life. I hope I have the sense to be!
“All wise men are bandits. They’re loyal to their friends, but they despise the rest. Why not, when the mass of people despise them if they aren’t bandits? Angus Duer had the sense to see this from the beginning, way back in medic school. He’s probably a perfect technician as a surgeon, but he knows you get only what you grab. Think of the years it’s taken me to learn what he savvied all the time!
“Know what I’ll do? I’ll stick to the Rouncefield Clinic till I’m making maybe thirty thousand a year, and then I’ll get Ockford and start my own clinic, with myself as internist and head of the whole shooting-match, and collect every cent I can.
“All right, if what people want is a little healing and a lot of tapestry, they shall have it—and pay for it.
“I never thought I could be such a failure—to become a commercialist and not want to be anything else. And I don’t want to be anything else, believe me! I’m through!”
CHAPTER XXV
I
Then for a year with each day longer than a sleepless night, yet the whole year speeding without events or seasons or eagerness, Martin was a faithful mechanic in that most competent, most clean and brisk and visionless medical factory, the Rouncefield Clinic. He had nothing of which to complain. The clinic did, perhaps, give over-many roentgenological examinations to socially dislocated women who needed children and floor-scrubbing more than pretty little skiagraphs; they did, perhaps, view all tonsils with too sanguinary a gloom; but certainly no factory could have been better equipped or more gratifyingly expensive, and none could have routed its raw human material through so many processes so swiftly. The Martin Arrowsmith who had been supercilious toward Pickerbaughs and old Dr. Winters had for Rouncefield and Angus Duer and the other keen taut specialists of the clinic only the respect of the poor and uncertain for the rich and shrewd.