Dr. Hurd held the door wide for Miriam to pass out and again his fresh closely knit worn brick-red face was deeply curved by the ironically chuckling hilarious smile with which he had met the incidents of the “awful German language.” That of the fatherland, the happy fatherland, nearly dislocates my jaw she could imagine him heartily and badly singing with a group of Canadian students. She smiled back at him without saying anything, rapidly piecing together the world that provoked his inclusive deeply carved smiles; himself, the marvellous little old country he found himself in as an incident of the business of forcing himself to be a doctor, his luck in securing an accomplished young English lady to prepare him for the struggle with the great medical world of Germany; his triumphant chuckling satisfaction in getting in first before the other fellows with an engagement to take her out. … The grandeur of this best bedroom of Mrs. Bailey was nothing to him. The room was just a tent in his wanderings. … For the moment he was going to take a young lady to a concert. That was how he saw it. He was a simple boyish red-haired open extension of Dr. von Heber. When she found herself out in the large grime and gloom of the twilit landing she realised that he had lifted her far further than Dr. von Heber into Canada; he was probably more Canadian. The ancient gloom of the house was nothing to him, he would get nothing of the quality of England in his personal life there, only passing glimpses from statements in books and in the conversation of other people. He did not see her as part of it all in the way Dr. von Heber had done talking at the table that night and wanting to talk to her because she was part of it. He saw her as an accomplished young lady, but a young lady like a Canadian young lady and a fellow was a fool if he did not arrange to take her out quick before the other fellows. But there was nothing in it but just that triumph. “I’ll get a silk hat before Sunday”; he would prepare for her to go all the way down to the Albert Hall as a young lady being taken to a concert; the Albert Hall on Sunday was brass bands; he thought they were a concert. His world was thin and open; but the swift sunlit decision and freedom of his innocent reception of her in his bedroom lifted the dingy brown house of her long memories into a new background. She was to be fêted, in an assumed character and whether she liked it or no. The four strange men in the little back sitting-room were her competing friends, the friends of all nice young ladies. He was the one who had laughed the laugh she had heard in the hall, of course. They never appeared but somehow they had got to know of her and had their curious baseless set ways of thinking and talking about her. Being doctors and still students they ought to be the most hateful and awful kind of men in relation to women, thinking and believing all the horrors of medical science; the hundred golden rules of gynæcology; if they had been Englishmen they would have gone about making one want to murder them; but they did not; Dr. Hurd was studying gyn’kahl’jy, but he did not apply its ugly lies to life; to Canadians women were people … but they were all the same people to Dr. Hurd.
That evening both Dr. Heber and Dr. Hurd appeared at dinner. Mrs. Bailey tumultuously arranged them opposite each other to her right and left. Miriam could not believe they were going to stay until they sat
