She looked at him with a languid curiosity—nothing more. “Why before two?” she inquired.
“Because this is one of my ‘Visitors’ Days,’ And the visitors’ time is from two to four.”
“What have I to do with your visitors?”
“Simply this. I think it important that perfectly respectable and perfectly disinterested witnesses should see you, in my house, in the character of a lady who has come to consult me.”
“Your motive seems rather far-fetched. Is it the only motive you have in the matter?”
“My dear, dear lady!” remonstrated the doctor, “have I any concealments from you? Surely, you ought to know me better than that?”
“Yes,” she said, with a weary contempt. “It’s dull enough of me not to understand you by this time. Send word upstairs when I am wanted.” She left him, and went back to her room.
Two o’clock came; and in a quarter of an hour afterward the visitors had arrived. Short as the notice had been, cheerless as the Sanitarium looked to spectators from without, the doctor’s invitation had been largely accepted, nevertheless, by the female members of the families whom he had addressed. In the miserable monotony of the lives led by a large section of the middle classes of England, anything is welcome to the women which offers them any sort of harmless refuge from the established tyranny of the principle that all human happiness begins and ends at home. While the imperious needs of a commercial country limited the representatives of the male sex, among the doctor’s visitors, to one feeble old man and one sleepy little boy, the women, poor souls, to the number of no less than sixteen—old and young, married and single—had seized the golden opportunity of a plunge into public life. Harmoniously united by the two common objects which they all had in view—in the first place, to look at each other, and, in the second place, to look at the Sanitarium—they streamed in neatly dressed procession through the doctor’s dreary iron gates, with a thin varnish over them of assumed superiority to all unladylike excitement, most significant and most pitiable to see!
The proprietor of the Sanitarium received his visitors in the hall with Miss Gwilt on his arm. The hungry eyes of every woman in the company overlooked the doctor as if no such person had existed; and, fixing on the strange lady, devoured her from head to foot in an instant.
“My First Inmate,” said the doctor, presenting Miss Gwilt. “This lady only arrived late last night; and she takes the present opportunity (the only one my morning’s engagements have allowed me to give her) of going over the Sanitarium.—Allow me, ma’am,” he went on, releasing Miss Gwilt, and giving his arm to the eldest lady among the visitors. “Shattered nerves—domestic anxiety,” he whispered, confidentially. “Sweet woman! sad case!” He sighed softly, and led the old lady across the hall.