are facts. They are
fresh enough in my memory. All seasons are swift when a man slips into
age and it was only four short years ago that this happened--so
marvelous, so suggestive of the things that we may do without
knowing--mark me! the things we may accomplish--_beyond the wall!_

You will see what I mean when I make a record of those strange events.
They began when poor MacMechem--an able practitioner he was, too--was
thrown from his saddle horse in the park and died in the ambulance
before they could get him to the Matthews Hospital. I inherited some of
his cases, and Marbury was one of those who begged me to come in at the
emergency. It was meningitis and it is out of my line. Perhaps the
Marbury wealth influenced me; perhaps it was because the banker--of
course I am not using the real names--went down on his knees on this
very rug which is under my feet as I write. There is such a thing as a
financial face. You see it often enough among those who deal with loans,
percents, examiners, and the market. It's the face of terror peering
through a heavy mask of smugness, and it was dreadful to see it looking
up at me.... I yielded.

The Marburys' house faces the group of trees which shade the very spot
where MacMechem's horse went insane. It is one of a block where each
residence represents a different architect--a sort of display of
individuality and affluence squeezed together like fancy crackers packed
in a box. My machine used to wait for me by the hour in front of the
pretentious show of flowers, tub-evergreens, glass and bronze
vestibules, and the other conventional paraphernalia of our rich city
successes.

It was their little girl. She was eight, I think, and her beauty was not
of the ordinary kind. Sometimes there rises out of the coarse,
undeveloped blood of peasants, or the thin and chilly tissue of families
going to seed, some extraordinary example like my little friend
Virginia. The spirit that looks out of eyes of profound depth, the
length of the black lashes lying upon a cheek of marvelous whiteness,
the delicate lines of the little body which delight the true artist, the
curve of the sensitive lips, the patient calm of personality suggesting
a familiarity with other worlds and with eternity, makes a strong
impression upon a medical man or surgeon who deals with the thousands of
human bodies, all wearing somewhere the repulsive distortions of
civilization. The ordinary personality stripped of the pret