"Smashing 'em up?" asked Ned, after the first welcome was over and he had lit a cigarette. Peter Ramsay shifted the papers a trifle shamefacedly. "Yes!" he replied; "it isn't a bit of good, of course; but it relieves my feelings and hurts theirs." "How did it come about?" "Didn't Mrs. Tressilian tell you? Well, I suppose I have been a bit of a fool--and yet, I don't see quite what else I could have done. I tell you, Blackborough, there isn't a spot in England on which you can tread firmly without crushing a vested interest. Take, for instance, that pint of beer business. I suppose you know that every one in this hospital is entitled to one pint of beer a day--typhoid fever patients, dying patients--the whole stock, lock, and barrel of nurses, doctors, porters, and such like. If the beer isn't drunk it's at any rate paid for. Think of the vested interests that means. So when I suggested retrenchments, and took the trouble to lay the German and even the Scotch figures before the governors--it costs a third less at least to run a patient in Scotland--there was the devil and all to pay; and--and some one made disparaging remarks about porridge, and so, of course, there was a row...." "Then about the operation." Peter Ramsay got up and began to walk about the room, and his voice became more argumentative. "You see, it was done, and the man died. Well, I wrote an account of it for the medical paper at Vienna, and some one got hold of it and translated it--well! not quite fairly. You see, it was a question whether a certain lesion--but that's a technical detail--I hadn't approved at the time, and I said so; and they made out I asserted the man had been killed through incompetence. All I meant was that it wasn't a fair test of the feasibility of the operation, and it wasn't. I tried to smooth them over, but, as I said at the time, one must tell the truth sometimes." Ned Blackborough interrupted with a sudden laugh. "Did that smooth them over?" "Not in the least," replied Peter Ramsay quite seriously, "and they wouldn't have it either that the translator was a fool and did not know German. So I resigned. There is never any good in trying to work with people who aren't satisfied." "None," assented Ned succinctly, "And what are you going to do?" "Go back to Pagenheim if nothing else turns up. One can live on _würst_ over there and no one thinks the--the worse of you, as they do here. My time isn't up till February, but I've offered to go at once if they like." "New Park is at your disposal." "You're awfully kind. If I go--perhaps. But something may crop up." As Ned Blackborough drove round to keep his appointment with Ted Cruttenden at his office, he told himself joyously that anything might crop up. These next few weeks had been to him for long so full of possibilities, that the whole world seemed to him capable of launching out into incredible action, of kicking over the traces even of conventional chance.