Skilful in diagnosis, resourceful in treatment, compassionate concerning the imponderable ailments of his patients as well as those visible, he had, it is true, bestowed a brief anxiety on certain of them left to the care of the diminishing number of proportionately overworked physicians in Vienna; but for himself.... Home where his heart was not, where Mizzi nagged and scolded, was icily disdainful or loudly reproachful, had long been a place in which he was desperately uncomfortable. The day he left for the front his aunt Ilde had come in from Baden to say goodbye to this much-loved, and as she knew, much-tried nephew. Looking out of the window she had seen him settle back into his seat in the motor, laughing in a gay, new way with the colleagues beside him as he opened his cigarette case. Hermann had indeed, been delivered by the war from something from which he had thought never to escape. For years, almost his only happy hours had been spent in his office, or hurrying about on his sick calls. He had a particular and personal regard for each patient, and the professional affection they awakened in him had a magnetic, communicable warmth, even the uninteresting old women, the chronic cases, received impartially, glowingly their share. His bedside manners were truly consoling and his warm handclasp, his reassuring pat on the shoulder made a visit to his office something to look forward to. In fact just seeing Doctor Bruckner made his patients feel that with his help they were not in any immediate danger of leaving this vale of tears for a world which, though they had always been assured was a better one, they had a singular distaste to entering. And then his gentle way with suffering children. Doctor Hermann Bruckner, specialist for women and children, was born to do just what he was doing. But when he got home that flowing, busy life of his would suddenly stop, turn back chokingly upon itself, obstructing his every thought and feeling; for though Mizzi was unspeakably bored by him, she couldn't let him alone. The very sight of his pleasant face, the easy way he had of letting his six feet settle into an armchair, the slow smoking of his Trabuco, in some extraordinary, always unexpected way, would give rise to reproaches; never a moment when he could sit at ease after a hard day's work and talk about pleasant things, little, unimportant things. He never could tell just what would unbind Mizzi's tongue or uncork her temper. He made an easy living and they could have had many pleasures, but Mizzi was always wanting the one thing that the hour had not brought. It was considered by the family that Hermann had a hard time of it, that it was unfortunate that Mizzi was as she was, and Hermann, for reasons in the beginning not at all related to his own being, was now generally called by his relations "poor Manny."