idling group at the tiled entrance, he cast on them a look of sudden fierce contempt. Then he laughed quietly, savagely.
“Oh, my God!” he said.
At the corner, scowling, he waited for Mrs. Pert to cross from the Post Office. She came over slowly, reeling.
Having arranged to meet her later in the pharmacy, he crossed over, and turned angularly down Federal Street behind the Post Office. At the second entrance to the Doctors’and Surgeons’Building, he turned in, and began to mount the dark creaking stairs. Somewhere, with punctual developing monotony, a single drop of water was falling into the wet black basin of a sink. He paused in the wide corridor of the first floor to control the nervous thudding of his heart. Then he walked half-way down and entered the waiting-room of Dr. J. H. Coker. It was vacant. Frowning, he sniffed the air. The whole building was sharp with the clean nervous odor of antiseptics. A litter of magazines—Life, Judge, The Literary Digest, and The American—on the black mission table, told its story of weary and distressed fumbling. The inner door opened and the doctor’s assistant, Miss Ray, came out. She had on her hat. She was ready to depart.
“Do you want to see the doctor?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Ben, “is he busy?”
“Come on in, Ben,” said Coker, coming to the door. He took his long wet cigar from his mouth, grinning yellowly. “That’s all for to-day, Laura. You can go.”
“Good-bye,” said Miss Laura Ray, departing.
Ben went into Coker’s office. Coker closed the door and sat down at his untidy desk.
“You’ll be more comfortable if you lie down on that table,” he said grinning.
Ben gave the doctor’s table a look of nausea.
“How many have died on that thing?” he asked. He sat down nervously in a chair by the desk, and lighted a cigarette, holding the flame to the charred end of cigar Coker thrust forward.
“Well, what can I do for you, son?” he asked.
“I’m tired of pushing daisies here,” said Ben. “I want to push them somewhere else.”
