tly
that whilst she is flicking off one speck she is already looking
elsewhere for another. In conversation she has the same trick, hardly
ever looking at the person she is addressing except when she is excited.
She has only one manner, and that is the manner of an old family nurse
to a child just after it has learnt to walk. She has used her ugliness
to secure indulgences unattainable by Cleopatra or Fair Rosamund,
and has the further great advantage over them that age increases her
qualification instead of impairing it. Being an industrious, agreeable,
and popular old soul, she is a walking sermon on the vanity of feminine
prettiness. Just as Redpenny has no discovered Christian name, she has
no discovered surname, and is known throughout the doctors' quarter
between Cavendish Square and the Marylebone Road simply as Emmy.

The consulting-room has two windows looking on Queen Anne Street.
Between the two is a marble-topped console, with haunched gilt legs
ending in sphinx claws. The huge pier-glass which surmounts it is mostly
disabled from reflection by elaborate painting on its surface of palms,
ferns, lilies, tulips, and sunflowers. The adjoining wall contains
the fireplace, with two arm-chairs before it. As we happen to face
the corner we see nothing of the other two walls. On the right of the
fireplace, or rather on the right of any person facing the fireplace, is
the door. On its left is the writing-table at which Redpenny sits. It is
an untidy table with a microscope, several test tubes, and a spirit lamp
standing up through its litter of papers. There is a couch in the
middle of the room, at right angles to the console, and parallel to the
fireplace. A chair stands between the couch and the windowed wall. The
windows have green Venetian blinds and rep curtains; and there is a
gasalier; but it is a convert to electric lighting. The wall paper and
carpets are mostly green, coeval with the gasalier and the Venetian
blinds. The house, in fact, was so well furnished in the middle of the
XIXth century that it stands unaltered to this day and is still quite
presentable.

EMMY [entering and immediately beginning to dust the couch] Theres a
lady bothering me to see the doctor.

REDPENNY [distracted by the interruption] Well, she cant see the doctor.
Look here: whats the use of telling you that the doctor cant take any
new patients, when the moment a knock comes to the door, in you bounce
to ask whether he can see so