Mr. Welland kept no servant, and no one came in to clean or cook for him. He took most of his meals at the ordinary down the street; messages were left for him there more often than at the cottage. In the cottage he maintained a monastic neatness--no dust, no clutter, very few possessions and those necessary, functional and in good order. "It's not difficult," he had explained on Reuben's first visit, "but a servant or woman-by-the-day would make it so, and by the way, Reuben, my house is never locked, this door from hall to surgery never closed except when I have a patient with me. I like simplicity, seeing it leaves one free to consider complexity--especially that of persons who a'n't so smart as you and me. Don't trouble to knock, I don't like it. I hate knocking. If it's loud I jump out of my skin, if it's soft I blame it on the mice." "Mice, with that cat?" "Mice is a general term, boy. Mice includes everything that bothers by day or goes thump in the night. If a door squeaks I blame it on the mice for a week before I oil it. Everyone needs a devil, Reuben, and mice have served me bravely in that capacity for lo, these many years. Pull up a chair and be at ease." On this Tuesday afternoon Reuben entered without knocking, an action that still caused him some shy discomfort, and spoke Mr. Welland's name unanswered. The door to the surgery stood open; also the stable door, as Reuben noticed through the window; the doctor was away, and this new loneliness an unexpected blow. "I am most unreasonable," said Reuben to Goody Snively, who rubbed his leg, and purred, and exercised a cat's privilege of trotting ahead and sitting down in front of his feet as he was about to go into the surgery. Reuben hooked her on his shoulder; she sang casually and damply in his ear as he went to the doctor's bookshelves and took down the Vesalius. "_This is a man----_" well, certainly, but also not a man. A man is motion and thought; a man is foolishness, courage, love, pain. Reuben turned the pages at the desk, rather blindly trying to force them into some clearness, and he wondered if there had been any truth at all in what he had said to Ben less than half an hour ago. Vesalius had not faded--that much was true. The mist is in the observer. Not only now, he thought, but always, in every observation, whether made at a favorable time or not. If I were happy, that also could deceive, a rosy mist no easier to penetrate than a gray one. If I were calm, neither sad nor happy--still a mist, of accepted thoughts that may be false as fog over quicksand. "But don't you see, Goody Snively?--we know one thing: we know the fog is there. And that, by the way, is my tender thigh and not a tree trunk. If you regard me as a tree, I may bark." Goody Snively retired--shocked, maybe.