Sommers arranged to hang his little celluloid sign, _Howard Sommers, M. D., Physician and Surgeon_, beneath his window. The proprietor of the Keystone thought it gave a desirable, professional air to the house. But Webber, the young man in the Baking Powder Trust, was sceptical of its commercial value to the doctor. Certainly the results from its appearance were not ascertainable. Sommers had no patients. The region about the Keystone was a part of the World's Fair territory, and had been greatly overbuilt. It had shrunk in these stagnant months to one-tenth of its possible population. There was, besides, an army of doctors, at least one for every five families Sommers judged from the signs. They were for the most part graduates of little, unknown medical schools or of drug stores. Lindsay had once said that this quarter of the city was a nest of charlatans. The two or three physicians of the regular school had private hospitals, sanitariums, or other means of improving their business. Many of the doctors used the drug stores as offices and places of rendezvous. Their signs hung, one below another, from a long crane at the entrances of the stores. It was an impartial, hospitable method of advertising one's services. There was one such bulletin at the shop on the corner of the neighboring avenue; the names were unfamiliar and foreign,--Jelly, Zarnshi, Pasko, Lemenueville. Sommers suspected that their owners had taken to themselves _noms de guerre_. At first Sommers avoided these places, and got the few drugs he needed at a well-known pharmacy in the city. He had an idea that matters would improve when people returned from the country or the seashore. But these people did not take long vacations. He had had but one case, the wife of a Swedish janitor in a flat-building, and he had reason to believe that his services had not pleased. Every morning, as Alves hurried to reach the Everglade School, his self-reproach increased. He hated to think that she was in the same treadmill in which he had found her. His failure was a matter of pride, also; he began to suspect that the people in the house talked about it. When Webber spoke to him of Dr. Jelly's success, he felt that the Keystone people had been making comparisons. They were walking to the railroad station after breakfast--the clerk on his way south to the baking powder works; he, for a daily paper. The young clerk nodded to a black-whiskered, sallow man, and said: "He's Doc. Jelly, and has the biggest practice around here. He's thick with the drug-store people,--has an interest in it, I have heard. I haven't seen your sign over there. Why don't you hang it out?"