Jackson Lemon, to dissipate his chagrin, had returned to the sessions of the medical congress, where, inevitably, he had fallen into the hands of Sidney Feeder, who enjoyed in this disinterested assembly the highest esteem. It was Dr. Feeder’s earnest desire that his old friend should share his credit—all the more easily that the medical congress was, as the young physician observed, a perpetual symposium. Jackson entertained the entire body at dinner—entertained it profusely and in a manner befitting one of the patrons of science rather than the humbler votaries; but these dissipations made him forget but for the hour the arrest of his relations with the house of Canterville. It punctually came back to him that he was disconcerted, and Dr. Feeder saw it stamped on his brow. Jackson Lemon, with his acute inclination to open himself, was on the point more than once of taking this sturdy friend into his confidence. His colleague gave him easy occasion—asked him what it was he was thinking of all the time and whether the young marchioness had concluded she couldn’t swallow a doctor. These forms of speech were displeasing to our baffled aspirant, whose fastidiousness was nothing new; but he had even deeper reasons for saying to himself that in such complicated cases as his there was no assistance in the Sidney Feeders. To understand his situation one must know the world, and the children of Cincinnati, prohibitively provincial, didn’t know the world—at least the world with which this son of New York was now concerned. “Is there a hitch in your marriage? Just tell me that,” Sidney Feeder had said, taking things for granted in a manner that of itself testified to an innocence abysmal. It is true he had added that he supposed he had no business to ask; but he had been anxious about it ever since hearing from Mr. and Mrs. Freer that the British aristocracy was down on the medical profession. “Do they want you to give it up? Is that what the hitch is about? Don’t desert your colours, Jackson. The suppression of pain, the mitigation of misery, constitute surely the noblest profession in the world.” “My dear fellow, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jackson could only observe in answer to this. “I haven’t told any one I was going to be married—still less have I told any one that any one objects to my profession. I should like to see any one do it. I’ve rather got out of the swim, but I don’t regard myself as the sort of person that people object to. And I do expect to do something yet.” “Come home, then, and do it. And don’t crush me with grandeur if I say that the facilities for getting married are much greater over there.” “You don’t seem to have found them very great,” Jackson sniffed. “I’ve never had time really to go into them. But wait till my next vacation and you’ll see.”