His dinner companion, the Balkan officer, came in presently and addressed Corey as “Doctor” (I adjusted myself to _that_, still with the Dubuque setting, however), and it was in the conversation following upon the new introduction that the object of his being in Paris came out. He told us, quite by the way, though not in the least depreciating the importance of his mission—that he was in Paris for a few days looking up anesthetics for the Serbian army. He had been working, he said, down in the Balkans since shortly after the outbreak of the war, in charge of a sanitary section. They’d been out of anesthetics for some time now—impossible to get them in—and they’d been operating, amputating the poor devils’ legs and arms, _without_ anesthetics; and now at last he’d left things long enough to come up to Paris himself and see what could be done. He was starting back the next day or the day after that. Corey, from Dubuque! In a makeshift Serbian field hospital, in that terrible cold, performing delicate and difficult operations—wholesale, as they must have been performed—on wounded Balkan soldiers; probing for bullets in raw wounds—_that_ was a picture to set up beside the one we had of him in Dubuque! And yet—it wasn’t at all a question of doubt (we’d read it all in the papers day after day); it wasn’t that we didn’t believe Corey was telling the truth; his evidence was too obvious for that—the picture didn’t somehow succeed in painting itself—I can’t to this day say why. Surely the Balkans just then—operations without anesthetics, the pageantry and blood-red color of war—surely there was pigment of more brilliant hue than any contained in the mere statement that his married sister lived a block and a half down the street from his mother’s. But the picture wasn’t painted. Corey wasn’t the artist to do it. Not, mind you, that he tried; he was as far from trying to impress one, from affectation, as a boy of fourteen. I do remember my imagination taking me far enough to think that if I were a soldier, and wounded, and had to have a leg or an arm off, I couldn’t think of a man I’d rather have do it than Corey. Oh yes, I believed him; I knew he’d been down there in the Balkans, as he said, and was going back again to-morrow—but I went right on seeing him in Dubuque, practising his quiet, prosperous profession in the same suite of offices his father had used before him. He himself lent, by the things he said, force and reality to the illusion. He’d like nothing better, he declared, than settling down in Dubuque for the rest of his life, and enjoying a home of his own. He intended, in fact, to do just that when he had finished the Balkan business. “I’m that type,” he said. “I never was meant to knock around the world like this.” And he _was_ that type, so much the type that it seemed hardly credible he shouldn’t turn out the exception to prove the rule. He had already, one would think, made a sufficient divergence.