When they were gone a student asked:
“How long d’you think she’ll last, sir?”
Dr. Tyrell shrugged his shoulders.
“Her brother and sister died within three months of the first symptoms. She’ll do the same. If they were rich one might do something. You can’t tell these people to go to St. Moritz. Nothing can be done for them.”
Once a man who was strong and in all the power of his manhood came because a persistent aching troubled him and his club-doctor did not seem to do him any good; and the verdict for him too was death, not the inevitable death that horrified and yet was tolerable because science was helpless before it, but the death which was inevitable because the man was a little wheel in the great machine of a complex civilisation, and had as little power of changing the circumstances as an automaton. Complete rest was his only chance. The physician did not ask impossibilities.
“You ought to get some very much lighter job.”
“There ain’t no light jobs in my business.”
“Well, if you go on like this you’ll kill yourself. You’re very ill.”
“D’you mean to say I’m going to die?”
“I shouldn’t like to say that, but you’re certainly unfit for hard work.”