This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler ROSE AND ROSE BY E. V. LUCAS * * * * * SECOND EDITION * * * * * METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON * * * * * _First Published_ _September 15th_, _1921_ _Second Edition_ _1921_ * * * * * ROSE AND ROSE Fifty years ago, when I was a young medical student, I was in the habit of spending as many week-ends as possible at home with my father, to whose practice I was one day to succeed. On a certain Saturday the only other occupants of the railway compartment were an artist and his wife. I knew him to be an artist from certain scraps of his conversation that I overheard, but I should have guessed it also on the evidence of his hands and dress. I don’t mean that he wore a black velvet tam-o’-shanter and trousers tight at the ankles, as in plays; but his hands were eloquent, and there was a general careless ease about his tweeds that suggested the antipodes of any commercial or anxious calling. After a while he turned to me and asked if I knew the town of Lowcester. I said that I had lived in the neighbourhood—at Bullingham, five miles away—all my life. “We are going to spend a few days at the Crown at Lowcester,” he said, “looking about to try and find a house.” “There’s a very good house at Bullingham,” I said: “just empty. Jolly garden too. As a matter of fact it adjoins ours. My father’s the doctor.” “Next door to the doctor,” said the lady, speaking now for the first time. “That would be a great convenience.” One result of this chance meeting was that they took the house and we became friends; another was the general shaping of my life; and a third is this narrative, the fruit of an old man’s egoism and leisure. * * * * * I don’t put my own case as an example to the medical profession, but you can’t deny there is a kind of fitness in it: it is surely more proper than not that the doctor who presides at the birth of a child should continue to take an interest in that child throughout its life. Being born is, after all, something of an event, and he who assists in that adventure and helps to introduce a new soul (not to mention a new body) to this already overcrowded and over-complicated planet of ours, ought to be counted as something a little more important than a jobbing gardener, say, or any other useful ally that the householder calls in. For no matter how mechanical his services, he is also an instrument of destiny.