Stalking out of the house in his own due time the Senior Surgeon reared back aghast at the sight. "Well--I'll be hanged!" he muttered. "Most everlastingly hanged! Wonder what they think this is? A somnolent kindergarten show? Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!" Awkwardly, on the top step, he struggled alone into his cumbersome coat. Every tingling nerve in his body, every shuddering sensibility, was racked to its utmost capacity over the distressing scenes he had left behind him in the big house. Back in that luxuriant sickroom, Youth Incarnate lay stripped, root, branch, leaf, bud, blossom, fruit, of All its manhood's promise. Back in that erudite library, Culture Personified, robbed of all its fine philosophy, sat babbling illiterate street-curses into its quivering hands. Back in that exquisite pink and gold boudoir, Blonded Fashion, ravished for once of all its artistry, ran stumbling round and round in interminable circles like a disheveled hag. In shrill crescendos and discordant basses, with heartpiercing jaggedness, with blood-curdling raspishness, each one, boy, father, mother, meddlesome relative, competent or incompetent assistant, indiscriminate servant, filing his separate sorrow into the Senior Surgeon's tortured ears! With one of those sudden revulsions to materialism which is liable to overwhelm any man who delves too long at a time in the brutally unconventional issues of life and death, the Senior Surgeon stepped down into the subtle, hyacinth-scented sunshine with every latent human greed in his body clamoring for expression--before it, too, should be hurtled into oblivion. "Eat, you fool, and drink, you fool, and be merry,--you fool,--for to-morrow--_even you,--Lendicott R. Faber--may have to die_!" brawled and re-brawled through his mind like a ribald phonograph tune. At the edge of the bottom step a precipitous lilac branch that must have budded and bloomed in a single hour smote him stingingly across his cheek. "Laggard!" taunted the lilac branch. With the first crunching grit of gravel under his feet, something transcendently naked and unashamed that was neither Brazen Sorrow nor Brazen Pain thrilled across his startled consciousness. Over the rolling, marshy meadow, beyond the succulent willow-hedge that hid the winding river, up from some fluent, slim canoe, out from a chorus of virile young tenor voices, a little passionate Love Song--divinely tender--most incomparably innocent--came stealing palpitantly forth into that inflammable Spring world without a single vestige of accompaniment on it! Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here, And Love is Lord of you and me, There's no bird in brake or brere, But to his little mate sings he, "Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here And Love is Lord of you--and me!" Wrenched like a sob out of his own lost youth the Senior Surgeon's faltering college memories took up the old refrain.