hreds a copy of
"The Dental Review and Practical Inlay Worker." She may have something
frightful the trouble with her. She couldn't possibly look more worried.
Perhaps it is very, very painful. This thought cheers you up
considerably. What cowards women are in times like these!

And then there comes the sound of voices from the next room.

"All right, Doctor, and if it gives me any more pain shall I call you
up?... Do you think that it will bleed much more?... Saturday morning,
then, at eleven.... Good bye, Doctor."

And a middle-aged woman emerges (all women are middle-aged when emerging
from the dentist's office) looking as if she were playing the big
emotional scene in "John Ferguson." A wisp of hair waves dissolutely
across her forehead between her eyes. Her face is pale, except for a
slight inflammation at the corners of her mouth, and in her eyes is that
far-away look of one who has been face to face with Life. But she is
through. She should care how she looks.

[Illustration: You would gladly change places with the most lawless of
God's creatures.]

The nurse appears, and looks inquiringly at each one in the room. Each
one in the room evades the nurse's glance in one last, futile attempt to
fool someone and get away without seeing the dentist. But she spots you
and nods pleasantly. God, how pleasantly she nods! There ought to be a
law against people being as pleasant as that.

"The doctor will see you now," she says.

The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words
than "The doctor will see you now." I am willing to concede something to
the phrase "Have you anything to say before the current is turned on."
That may be worse for the moment, but it doesn't last so long. For
continued, unmitigating depression, I know nothing to equal "The doctor
will see you now." But I'm not narrow-minded about it. I'm willing to
consider other possibilities.

Smiling feebly, you trip over the extended feet of the man next to you,
and stagger into the delivery-room, where, amid a ghastly array of
death-masks of teeth, blue flames waving eerily from Bunsen burners, and
the drowning sound of perpetually running water which chokes and gurgles
at intervals, you sink into the chair and close your eyes.

* * * * *

But now let us consider the spiritual exaltation that comes when you are
at last let down and turned loose. It is all over, and what did it
amount to? Why, noth