es in at their doors with half-disguised contempt.
You know the expression of the prize dog who is borne from the show
hung with medals and ribbons--how he gazes on the little mongrel curs
that gather with the crowd in the streets?

Her name, Chittenden-Ffollette, is of as vital importance as her
medical-journal malady. When the third floor is in dire confusion; when
Mrs. Parks has hysterics and Miss Simmons is crying for her mother, and
Mrs. Bell's hot-water bottle has burst in the bed, and Miss Phipps has
discovered that the undergraduate has bandaged the wrong ankle, Miss
Blossom sometimes becomes flustered and hurried and calls her patient
Mrs. Follett, whereupon she says, "_Chittenden_-Ffoll_ette, if_ you
please!"

If by any chance she sees the Chittenden-Ffollette without the hyphen
in the Nurses' Bedside Record Book or scribbled on the morning paper
she doesn't need any stimulant the rest of the day. The omission of
the hyphen sends up her pulse and temperature to the required point
for several hours, though there is always a reaction afterward. I've
told Dr. Levi that I should name one of her complaints hyphenitis. The
occasional operation performed on the hyphen by Miss Blossom, or the
young lady at the stationery counter, might be called hyphenotomy.
Everybody detests Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette, but as the banner patient
of the sanitarium she must be treated with respectful consideration.
All America's most skillful physicians have struggled with her
organism. They have tried to get her symptoms into line, so to speak,
so as to deduce some theory from the grand array of phenomena, but the
symptoms courteously decline to point in any one direction. When the
doctors get seven eighths of them in satisfactory relation there are
always two or three that stay out and sulk, refusing to collaborate in
any sort of harmony. They act precisely like an obstinate jury, in
that they calmly refuse to agree, and then Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette
appeals to a higher court where flaws in the testimony are always
found, judgment is reversed, and a new trial ordered. The greatest
surgeons in Europe have left the bedsides of crowned heads to ponder
over her inscrutable mysteries, and have returned to their sovereigns
crushed and humbled. All this attention would have upset a stronger
character than hers, and now that she is in a fair way to recover, her
pride will have its inevitable fall. Though much more agreeable and
docile than