Having this resource, Rose needed less entertaining than any child I ever knew. Give her a pencil and a piece of paper and she would be happy until the paper was covered on both sides. It is odd that her mother had no desire to draw and no aptitude: that the talent should skip a generation and manifest itself again in Theodore’s grandchild; but so it was. Rose the elder had beguiled her loneliness by telling herself stories; Rose the younger scribbled men and women and little girls and little boys and dogs and huntsmen and princesses and cats on the blank spaces of letters and the insides of envelopes or whatever scraps of paper could be found, from morn till dewy eve. * * * * * Ronnie’s people took too much delight in illness to be happy in their aloofness from me. Disregarding a certain solidarity in the medical profession, they had assumed that Dr. Vaughan in the next town would be only too willing to obey their capricious summonses whenever the slightest pain made itself felt in either of their systems. But Vaughan was a friend of mine by no means desirous of supplanting me anywhere or of getting a footing in the Hall. He therefore refused to go. Doctors, it is notorious, must obey calls of distress or bear the consequences, but not when other doctors are nearer, and, as he knew why I was not called and knew also that Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson knew that he knew why I was not called, he was in a very strong position—strengthened by the alliance of the telephone, which enabled him to make quite sure of his ground. Most telephone wires, could they be induced to repeat all that they have ever transmitted, would have some odd things to tell, and the conversations between Vaughan and myself while this feud was flourishing would not be least amusing. We had the great advantage of having been contemporaries at the same hospital, and it is, at bottom, only contemporaries who really understand each other. Old and young may meet, but contemporaries mingle. In the face of the confederacy between Vaughan and myself the unhappy Fergussons, racked with gout, were forced to send for Vaughan’s rival, a young bumptious and climbing practitioner who had just set up in the place and was pulling every wire for social advancement, but who, for all his latest learning and diplomas, was wanting in the most important quality that a medical attendant can possess, the power to suggest confidence. There are patients who would languish under the care of the most brilliant physician in the world lacking the gift, and who would recover quickly though only a farrier, possessing it, should stand beside their bed. Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson were therefore very awkwardly placed.