wanted to arbitrate."
He spoke deprecatingly of their innocence, but Porter's tones were harsh.
"To arbitrate! to arbitrate! when we are making money by having 'em quit."
Miss Hitchcock turned apprehensively to her companion. Her handsome, clear face was perplexed; she was distressed over the way the talk was going.
"It's as bad as polo!" she exclaimed, in low tones. But the doctor did not hear her.
"Is it so," he was asking Colonel Hitchcock, "that the men who had been thrifty enough to get homes outside of Pullman had to go first because they didn't pay rent to the company? I heard the same story from a patient in the hospital."
By this time Caspar Porter had turned his attention to the conversation at the other end of the table. His florid face was agape with astonishment at the doctor's temerity. Parker Hitchcock shrugged his shoulders and muttered something to Miss Lindsay. The older men moved in their chairs. It was an unhappy topic for dinner conversation in this circle.
"Well, I don't know," Colonel Hitchcock replied, a slight smile creeping across his face. "Some say yes, and some say no. Perhaps Porter can tell you."
"We leave all that to the superintendent," the latter replied stiffly. "I haven't looked into it. The works isn't a hospital."
"That's a minor point," Carson added, in a high-pitched voice. "The real thing is whether a corporation can manage its own affairs as it thinks best or not."
"The thrifty and the shiftless," interposed Dr.
Lindsay, nodding to his young colleague.
"Well, the directors are a unit. That settles the matter," Porter ended dogmatically. "The men may starve, but they'll never get back now."
The young doctor's face set in rather rigid lines. He had made a mistake, had put himself outside the sympathies of this comfortable circle. Miss Hitchcock was looking into the flowers in front of her, evidently searching for some remark that would lead the dinner out of this uncomfortable slough, when Brome Porter began again sententiously:
"The laborer has got some hard lessons to learn. This trouble is only a small part of the bigger trouble. He wants to get more than he is worth. And all our education, the higher education, is a bad thing." He turned with marked emphasis toward the young doctor. "That's why I wouldn't give a dollar to any begging college—not a dollar to make a lot of discontented, lazy duffers who go round exciting workingmen to think they're badly treated. Every dollar given a man to educate himself above his natural position is a dollar given to disturb society."
Before Sommers could accept the challenge in this speech, Miss Hitchcock asked—
"But what did you do with your visitor, papa?"
"Well, we had some more talk," he replied evasively. "Maybe that's why I missed you, Brome, at the club. He stayed most an hour."
"Did he go then?" the girl pressed on mischievously.
"Well, I gave him a 'yob' over at the yards. It wasn't much of a 'yob' though."
This speech aroused some laughter, and the talk drifted on in little waves into safer channels. The episode, however, seemed to have made an undue impression upon Sommers. Miss Hitchcock's efforts to bring him into the conversation failed. As for Mrs. Lindsay, he paid her not the slightest attention. He was coolly taking his own time to think, without any sense of social responsibility.
"What is the matter?" his companion said to him at last, in her low, insistent voice. "You are behaving so badly. Why won't you do anything one wants you to?"
Sommers glanced at his companion as if she had shaken him out of a dream.
Her dark eyes were gleaming with irritation, and her mouth trembled.
"I had a vision," Sommers replied coolly.
"Well!" The man's egotism aroused her impatience, but she lowered her head to catch every syllable of his reply.
"I seemed to see things in a flash—to feel an iron crust of prejudice."
The girl's brow contracted in a puzzled frown, but she waited. The young doctor tried again to phrase the matter.
"These people—I mean your comfortable rich—seem to have taken a kind of oath of self-preservation. To do what is expected of one, to succeed, you must take the oath. You must defend their institutions, and all that," he blundered on.
"I don't know what you mean," the girl replied coolly, haughtily, raising her head and glancing over the table.
"I am not very clear. Perhaps I make a great deal of nothing. My remarks sound 'young' even to me."
"I don't pretend to understand these questions. I wish men wouldn't talk business at dinner. It is worse than polo!"
She swept his face with a glance of distrust, the lids of her eyes half lowered, as if to put a barrier between them.
"Yes," Sommers assented; "it is harder to understand."
It was curious, he thought, that a woman could take on the new rights, the aristocratic attitude, so much more completely than a man. Miss Hitchcock was a full generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing to an end.
"I hope you will talk with Dr. Lindsay. He is a very able man. And," she hesitated a moment and then looked frankly at him, "he can do so much for a young doctor who has his way to make."
"Don't you think that might make it harder for me to talk to him?" Sommers asked, irritated by her lack of tact.
The girl's face flushed, and she pressed her lips together as if to push back a sharp reply.
"That is unfair. We are going now—but sometime we must talk it out."
The men stretched themselves and rearranged their chairs in little groups. Parker Hitchcock, Carson, and young Porter—were talking horses; they made no effort to include the young doctor in their corner. He was beginning to feel uncomfortably stranded in the middle of the long room, when Dr. Lindsay crossed to his side. The talk at dinner had not put the distinguished specialist in a sympathetic light, but the younger man felt grateful for this act of cordiality. They chatted about St. Isidore's, about the medical schools in Chicago, and the medical societies. At last Dr. Lindsay suggested casually, as he refilled his liqueur-glass:
"You have made some plans?"
"No, not serious ones. I have thought of taking a vacation. Then there is another hospital berth I could have. Head of a small hospital in a mining town. But I don't like to leave Chicago, on the whole."
"You are right," the older physician remarked slowly. "Such a place would bury you; you would never be heard of."
Sommers smiled at the penalty held out, but he did not protest.
"There isn't any career in hospital work, anyway, for a steady thing. You get side-tracked."
"I like it better than family practice," Sommers jerked out. "You don't have to fuss with people, women especially. Then I like the excitement of it."
"That won't last long," the older man smiled indulgently. "And you'll have a wife some day, who will make you take a different view. But there are other things—office practice."
He dilated on the advantages of office practice, while the younger man smoked and listened deferentially. Office practice offered a pleasant compromise between the strenuous scientific work of the hospital and the grind of family practice. There were no night visits, no dreary work with the poor—or only as much as you cared to do—and it paid well, if you took to it. Sommers reflected that the world said it paid Lindsay about fifty thousand a year. It led, also, to lectureships, trusteeships—a mass of affairs that made a man prominent and important in the community.