They all comported themselves as became members of the staff of a great hospital; they would not have been of much use in any of the ordinary sicknesses that require the aid of the experienced general practitioner or family doctor, who is so serviceable in our every-day troubles and infirmities: they paid no attention to colds, measles, and the mumps; they aspired to greater things, and occupied themselves with eye diseases, maladies of the brain, or the higher surgery. Attend you in your attack of the gout? Oh, dear no! any fool of a G.P. (slang for general practitioner) could do that, or your nurse might manage the case. But trephine you, resect your knee-joint, or do a gastrotomy upon you,—they were burning with enthusiasm for nothing less. So they all told each other they meant to be operating surgeons, speciality men, consulting physicians; they would all go to live and practise in Saville Row, or the neighbourhood of Cavendish Square. “Work for half-crowns like the miserable family doctors in the high-road outside? Not if they knew it!” They were born to send cases to the _Lancet_, to read papers at Congresses, to edit the _Journal of Psychopathy_, or arouse the medical world by their work on “Diseases of the Upper Eyelid.” Poor beggars; in ten years’ time seven-tenths of them would be toiling up rotten staircases, or groping in coal mines, visiting patients at an average of nine-pence-halfpenny a head, or holding parish appointments, and doing Friendly Societies’ work at half that rate; while of the other three-tenths, one would be starving in two gloomy rooms in a West End square, the second might make his fortune by marrying a rich wife, and the other work his way to distinction late in life by an ultimate succession to the permanent staff of his own hospital. Now and then he might be luckier still; he might start a special Hospital for Diseases of the Upper Eyelid, and so work his way to eminence and emolument. Of course all these men were supremely scientific. What was pain (in other people), if science could be advanced? What was suffering (in patients), if anything could be added to the sum of our knowledge as to the causes of their suffering? To cure the disease, to cut short the malady—ah, no, too often that was to extinguish alike the discomfort and the interesting course of phenomena that accompanied it. The true patient, the typical client, was he who—devoured by fever or disfigured by disease—asked for nothing better than to be well watched by observant medical eyes, while the “expectant treatment” (_i.e._, the letting the disease severely alone) did its work. To the objection that a man may die while the expected cure does not arrive, what more obvious than the answer, “But see what a brilliant paper for the Journal is the outcome of it all?” Somehow, Podger vaguely saw all this. Podger recognised that all the “cases” were but “cases.” She knew that Mr. Graves was getting up