He had one long sitting after another, the time given to one patient overlapping the appointment with the next so that her clearings and cleansings were done with a patient in the chair, noiselessly and slowly, keeping her in the room, making to-day seem like a continuation of yesterday afternoon. Yesterday shed its radiance. The shared mirth made a glowing background to her toil. The duties accumulating downstairs made her continued presence in the surgery a sort of truancy. She felt more strongly than ever the sense of her usefulness to him. She had never so far helped him so deftly and easily, being everywhere and nowhere, foreseeing his needs without impeding his movements, doing everything without reminding the patient that there was a third person in the room. She followed sympathetically the long slow processes of excavation and root treatment, the delicate shaping and undercutting of the walls of cavities, the adjustment and retention of the many appliances for the exclusion of moisture, the insertions of the amalgams and pastes whose pounding and mixing made a recurrent crisis in her morning. She wished again and again that the dentally ignorant dentally ironic world could see the operator at his best; in his moments of quiet intense concentration on giving his best to his patients. 2 The patients suffering the four long sittings were all of the best group, leisurely and untroubled as to the mounting up of guineas and three of them intelligently appreciative of what was being done. _They_ knew all about the "status" of modern dentistry and the importance of teeth. They were all clear serene tranquil cheerful people who probably hardly ever went to a doctor. They would rate oculists and dentists on a level with doctors and two of them at least would rate Mr. Hancock on a level with anybody.... Tomorrow would be quite different, a rush of gas cases, that man who was sick if an instrument touched the back of his tongue; Mrs. Wolff, disputing fees, the deaf-mute, the grubby little man on a newspaper ... he ought to have no patients but these intelligent ones and really nervous and delicate people and children. 3 "I sometimes wish I'd stuck to medicine." "Why?" "Well--I don't know. You know they get a good deal more all round out of their profession than a dentist does. It absorbs them more.... I don't say it ought not to be the same with dentistry. But it isn't. I don't know a dentist who wants to go on talking shop until the small hours. I'm quite sure _I_ don't. Now look at Randle. He was dining here last night. So was Bentley. We separated at about midnight; and Randle told me this morning that he and Bentley walked up and down Harley Street telling each other stories, until two o'clock." "That simply means they talk about their patients." "Well--yes. They discuss their cases from every point of view. They get more human interest out of their work."