"If I were going to tell any stories about medical men," Karl went on, and in his quiet voice there was still that compelling note, "it seems to me I should want to say something about the doctors who died game--just a little something about the men who took their medicine and said nothing; men with the nerve to face even their own understanding--cut off, you see, from the refuge of fooling themselves. Ask Dr. Parkman about the surgeons who lost their hands or their lives through infection. Those are the stories he knows that are worth while. He's only giving you the surface of it, Georgia. Tell him you'd like a little of the real thing. Ask him about the men who died slow deaths, looking a fatal future in the face from a long way off. He mentioned Bilroth just now, telling a funny story about him. There's a better story than that to tell about Bilroth. You know he was the man who knew so much about the heart; he probably understood the heart better than any other man. And by one of those leering tricks of fate, he had heart disease himself. He watched his own case and made notes on it, that his profession might profit by his destruction. There you have something worth writing about! In his last letter home, he said he had ten days to live--and he missed it by just one; he lived eleven. If you're going to tell any stories about Bilroth, tell that one, Georgia. And then a story or two showing that while many men take chances, it's the doctor who takes them most understandingly. Why medical science is full of an almost grotesque courage! Don't you begin to see how the doctor's been trifling with you, Georgia?" He paused, but no one felt the impulse to speak. His eyes were hidden by the dark glasses he was wearing because of that cold, or whatever it was, in his eyes, but his face told the story of an alert mind, a heart responsive to the things of which he spoke. Then he went on and talked a little, quietly enough, but with a passionateness, a high note of understanding, of the men who had had the nerve--eyes open--to face the things fate handed them. It was as if he were looking back over the whole sweep of the world and picking from many times and many places the men whose souls had not flinched to the death. And at the last he said, smiling--the kind of smile one meets with a tear--"Let's have a little toast." He raised his glass of claret and for a minute looked at it in silence. And then he said slowly, his very quiet voice and that little smile tempering the words: "Here's to all those fellows who went down without the banners or the trumpets!--To the boys who took the starch out of their own tragedies!--To those first class sports who made no fuss about their own funerals! Here's to the Great Unwhimpering!"