other doctor was a
quack, and her patient was totally undone. He would sit, grum enough,
with his feet higher than his head, chewing an unlighted cigar, and
leave them both thankful when he saw proper to go.

The truth is, Knowles was thoroughly out of place in these little
mending-shops called sick-chambers, where bodies are taken to pieces,
and souls set right. He had no faith in your slow, impalpable cures:
all reforms were to be accomplished by a wrench, from the abolition of
slavery to the pulling of a tooth.

He had no especial sympathy with Holmes, either: the men were started
in life from opposite poles: and with all the real tenderness under his
surly, rugged habit, it would have been hard to touch him with the
sudden doom fallen on this man, thrown crippled and penniless upon the
world, helpless, it might be, for life. He would have been apt to tell
you, savagely, that "he wrought for it."

Besides, it made him out of temper to meet the sisters. Knowles could
have sketched for you with a fine decision of touch the role played by
the Papal power in the progress of humanity,--how far it served as a
stepping-stone, and the exact period when it became a wearisome clog.
The world was done with it now,--utterly. Its breath was only poisoned,
with coming death. So the homely live charity of these women, their
work, which no other hands were ready to take, jarred against his
abstract theory, and irritated him, as an obstinate fact always does
run into the hand of a man who is determined to clutch the very heart
of a matter. Truth will not underlie all facts, in this muddle of a
world, in spite of the Positive Philosophy, you know.

Don't sneer at Knowles. Your own clear, tolerant brain, that reflects
all men and creeds alike, like colourless water, drawing the truth from
all, is very different, doubtless, from this narrow, solitary soul, who
thought the world waited for him to fight down his one evil before it
went on its slow way. An intolerant fanatic, of course. But the truth
he did know was so terribly real to him, there was such sick, throbbing
pity in his heart for men who suffered as he had done! And then,
fanatics must make history for conservative men to learn from, I
suppose.

If Knowles shunned the hospital, there was another place he shunned
more,--the place where his Communist buildings were to have stood. He
went out there once, as one might go alone to bury his dead out of his
sight, th