"Oh yes, sir," said the house-physician. "The man was brought in last
night. Dr Dowling" [the resident assistant-physician] "saw him, and
thought it a case of ordinary trance, that could easily wait till you
came, as usual, to-morrow."
"Ah, well," said Lefevre, "let me see him."
Seen thus, the physician appeared a different person from the cheerful,
modest man of the Hyacinth Club. He had now put on the responsibility of
men's health and the enthusiasm of his profession. He seemed to swell in
proportions and dignity, though his eye still beamed with a calm and
kindly light.
The young man led the way down the echoing flagged passage, and up the
flight of stone stairs. As they went they encountered many silent female
figures, clean and white, going up or down (it was the time of changing
nurses), so that a fanciful stranger might well have thought of the
stairway reaching from earth to heaven, on which the angels of God were
seen ascending and descending. A stranger, too, would have noted the
peculiar odours that hung about the stairs and passages, as if the
ghosts of medicines escaped from the chemist's bottles were hovering in
the air.
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