MISS HOAG: No, no! I'll pay, Doctor. How much? How much? THE BARON: Yeh. I'll throw in a tenner myself. Don't throw the poor devil to charity. We'll collect from the troupe. We raised forty dollars for a nigger wild man, once when-- THE DOCTOR: Come now; all this is not a drop in the bucket. This man needs an operation and then constant attention. If he pulls through, it is a question of months. What he actually needs then is country air, fresh milk, eggs, professional nursing, and plenty of it! Miss HOAG: That's me, Doc! That's me! I'm going to fix just that for him. I got the means. I can show you three bank-books. I got the means and a place out in Ohio I can rent 'til I buy it some day. A farm! Fresh milk! Leghorns! I'll take him out there, Doc. Eighty miles from where I was born. I was thinking of laying up awhile, anyways. I got the means. I'll pull him through, Doctor. I'll pull him through! THE BARON: Good God! Teenie--you crazy-- FROM THE BED: Worth her weight in gold. Worth her weight in gold. * * * * * In the cup of a spring dusk that was filled to overflowing with an ineffable sweetness and the rich, loamy odors of turned earth; with rising sap and low mists; with blackening tree-tops and the chittering of birds--the first lamplight of all the broad and fertile landscape moved across the window of a story-and-a-half white house which might have been either itself or its own outlying barn. A roof, sheer of slant, dipped down over the window, giving the facade the expression of a coolie under peaked hat. "Great Scott! Move that lamp off the sill! You want to gimme the blind staggers?" "I didn't know it was in your eyes, honey. There--that better?" Silence. A parlor hastily improvised into a bedroom came out softly in the glow. A room of matting and marble-topped, bottle-littered walnut table, of white iron hospital-cot and curly horsehair divan, a dapple-marble mantelpiece of conch-shell, medicated gauze, bisque figurines, and hot-water kettle; in the sheerest of dimity, still dainty of ribbon, the figure of Miss Hoag, hugely, omnipotently omnipresent. "That better, Jas?" Silence. "Better? That's good! Now for the boy's supper. Beautiful white egg laid by beautiful white hen and all beat up fluffy with sugar to make boy well, eh?" Emaciated to boniness, the great frame jutting and straining rather terribly to break through the restraint of too tight flesh, Mr. Jastrow rose to his elbow, jaw-lines sullen. "Cut out that baby talk and get me a swig, Teenie. Get me a drink before I get ugly." "Oh, Jastrow honey, don't begin that. Please, Jastrow, don't begin that. You been so good all day, honey--" "Get me a swig," he repeated through set teeth. "You and a boob country quack of a doctor ain't going to own my soul. I'll bust up the place again. I ain't all dead yet. Get me a swig--quick, too." "Jas, there ain't none." "There is!"