thought I’d bust a gut, doc, when you pulled that one about embalming the broken heart of Grief.”
At this moment Dr. Ravenel brought his Hudson to a halt across the street before the Post Office, and walked over rapidly, drawing his gauntlets off. He was bareheaded; his silver aristocratic hair was thinly rumpled; his surgical gray eyes probed restlessly below the thick lenses of his spectacles. He had a famous, calm, deeply concerned face, shaven, ashen, lean, lit gravely now and then by humor.
“Oh Christ!” said Coker. “Here comes Teacher!”
“Good morning, Hugh,” he said as he entered. “Are you going into training again for the bughouse?”
“Look who’s here!” McGuire roared hospitably. “Dead-eye Dick, the literary sawbones, whose private collection of gallstones is the finest in the world. When d’jew get back, son?”
“Just in time, it seems,” said Ravenel, holding a cigarette cleanly between his long surgical fingers. He looked at his watch. “I believe you have a little engagement at the Ravenel hospital in about half an hour. Is that right?”
“By God, Dick, you’re always right,” McGuire yelled enthusiastically. “What’d you tell’em up there, boy?”
“I told them,” said Dick Ravenel, whose affection was like a flower that grew behind a wall, “that the best surgeon in America when he was sober was a lousy bum named Hugh McGuire who was always drunk.”
“Now wait, wait. Hold on a minute!” said McGuire, holding up his thick hand. “I protest, Dick. You meant well, son, but you got that mixed up. You mean the best surgeon in America when he’s not sober.”
“Did you read one of your papers?” said Coker.
“Yes,” said Dick Ravenel. “I read one on carcinoma of the liver.”
“How about one on pyorrhea of the toe-nails?” said McGuire. “Did you read that one?”
Harry Tugman laughed heavily, not wholly knowing why. McGuire belched into the silence loudly and was witlessly adrift for a moment.
“Literature, literature, Dick,” he returned portentously. “It’s been
