Inside the door was a narrow waiting-room that concentrated into an incredibly small number of cubic feet the characteristic odour of an out-patient department. Every seat was occupied, and Edwin, deciding to wait for his turn, stood listening to a varied recitation of medical history that every patient seemed compelled by the surroundings to relate to her neighbour. At the moment when he entered a very stout woman, who had been drinking, had the ear of the company, talking loudly over the shoulder of a pasty child whose neck was covered with the pin-points that fleas make on an insensitive skin, and occasionally, in accessions of tenderness, hugging it to her bosom. “So I says to the inspector . . . yes, inspector, ’e ’ad the nerve to call ’isself . . . says I, you can take your summonses to ’ell, I says. I _love_ my children, I says. There’s more love for the little ’armless things in my finger than there’ll ever be in your bloody body, I says. And I caught ’er up and carried ’er straight along ’ere to the doctor. Doctor ’Arris knows me, I says, and what’s more ’e shall ’ave a look at Margaret’s ’ead with ’is own eyes. Shan’t ’e, my pretty?” The child wriggled as she was clasped in another beery embrace. A bell tingled inside. “Now we shall see,” said the lady determinedly rising. “And ’ave a stifficate if it costs me two shillin’s.” The room murmured low applause and sympathy, and she entered the surgery, emerging, two minutes later, with the testimonial in her mouth. “What did I tell yo’?” she said. “The doctor says there ain’t one. Not _one_. It’s time these inspectors was done away with. I only ’ope ’e will summons me. Good-night, all.” She went out, hugging the child in both arms, and a pale woman, respectably dressed, who had sat through her tirades in silence, took her place in the doctor’s consulting room. Dr. Altrincham-Harris didn’t keep her long. She came out, like the rest of them, after an interview that lasted perhaps two minutes, carrying a bottle of medicine wrapped up in one of the papers that are called comic. Again the bell rang. “Good God,” Edwin thought, “and this is general practice!” It was evident that he had entered a world in which the academic methods of diagnosis and prescription with which he had been educated were not followed. On the surface it was quite clear that the physician could not have given an eighth part of the usual time or care to the consideration of any single case. He remembered instances of hospital patients who had affected to despise the perfunctoriness of the methods of the Prince’s out-patient department, and had boasted that they would receive better attention from the hands of a “private doctor.” He hoped to goodness that none of these unfortunate people would drift into the hands of Dr. Altrincham-Harris.