ur
neighbour and concealed in yourself. How can a man be glad that he is
alive, and frankly show it, without a touch of conceit and a
reprehensible forgetfulness of the presence of original sin even in
the best families? The manners of a professional man, above all,
should at once express and impose humility.

Young Dr. Carmichael, Calvinton said, had been spoiled by his life in
New York. It had made him too gay, light-hearted, almost frivolous. It
was possible that he might know a good deal about medicine, though
doubtless that had been exaggerated; but it was certain that his
temperament needed chastening before he could win the kind of
confidence that Calvinton had given to the venerable Dr. Coffin, whose
face was like a monument, and whose practice rested upon the two
pillars of podophyllin and predestination.

So Carmichael still felt, after his five years' work, that he was an
outsider; felt it rather more indeed than when he had first come. He
had enough practice to keep him in good health and spirits. But his
patients were along the side streets and in the smaller houses and out
in the country. He was not called, except in a chance emergency, to
the big houses with the white pillars. The inner circle had not yet
taken him in.

He wondered how long he would have to work and wait for that. He knew
that things in Calvinton moved slowly; but he knew also that its
silent and subconscious judgments sometimes crystallised with
incredible rapidity and hardness. Was it possible that he was already
classified in the group that came near but did not enter, an
inhabitant but not a real burgher, a half-way citizen and a lifelong
new-comer? That would be rough; he would not like growing old in that
way.

But perhaps there was no such invisible barrier hemming in his path.
Perhaps it was only the naturally slow movement of things that
hindered him. Some day the gate would open. He would be called in
behind those white pillars into the world of which his father had
often told him stories and traditions. There he would prove his skill
and his worth. He would make himself useful and trusted by his work.
Then he could marry the girl he loved, and win a firm place and a real
home in the old town whose strange charm held him so strongly even in
the vague sadness of this autumnal night.

He turned again from these musings to his Balzac, and read the
wonderful pages in which Benassis tells the story of his consecration
to his