them!" with gusto.

The determining factor about Dr. Archie was that he was romantic. He had
married Belle White because he was romantic--too romantic to know
anything about women, except what he wished them to be, or to repulse a
pretty girl who had set her cap for him. At medical school, though he
was a rather wild boy in behavior, he had always disliked coarse jokes
and vulgar stories. In his old Flint's Physiology there was still a poem
he had pasted there when he was a student; some verses by Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes about the ideals of the medical profession. After so much
and such disillusioning experience with it, he still had a romantic
feeling about the human body; a sense that finer things dwelt in it than
could be explained by anatomy. He never jested about birth or death or
marriage, and did not like to hear other doctors do it. He was a good
nurse, and had a reverence for the bodies of women and children. When he
was tending them, one saw him at his best. Then his constraint and
self-consciousness fell away from him. He was easy, gentle, competent,
master of himself and of other people. Then the idealist in him was not
afraid of being discovered and ridiculed.

In his tastes, too, the doctor was romantic. Though he read Balzac all
the year through, he still enjoyed the Waverley Novels as much as when
he had first come upon them, in thick leather-bound volumes, in his
grandfather's library. He nearly always read Scott on Christmas and
holidays, because it brought back the pleasures of his boyhood so
vividly. He liked Scott's women. Constance de Beverley and the minstrel
girl in "The Fair Maid of Perth," not the Duchesse de Langeais, were his
heroines. But better than anything that ever got from the heart of a man
into printer's ink, he loved the poetry of Robert Burns. "Death and Dr.
Hornbook" and "The Jolly Beggars," Burns's "Reply to his Tailor," he
often read aloud to himself in his office, late at night, after a glass
of hot toddy. He used to read "Tam o'Shanter" to Thea Kronborg, and he
got her some of the songs, set to the old airs for which they were
written. He loved to hear her sing them. Sometimes when she sang, "Oh,
wert thou in the cauld blast," the doctor and even Mr. Kronborg joined
in. Thea never minded if people could not sing; she directed them with
her head and somehow carried them along. When her father got off the
pitch she let her own voice out and covered him.

XIII

At the