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Miss Rhoda Vivian.
The gas-jets were turned low in the consulting-room; when he raised
them he saw a beautiful woman standing by the fire in an attitude of
impatience. He had kept her waiting; and it seemed that this adorable
person knew the value of time. She was not going to waste words either.
As it was impossible to associate her with the ordinary business of the
place, he was prepared for her terse and lucid statement of somebody
else's case. He said he would look round early in the morning (Miss
Vivian looked dissatisfied); or perhaps that evening (Miss Vivian was
dubious); or possibly at once (Miss Vivian smiled in hurried approval).
She was eager to be gone. And when she had gone he stood
deliberating. Miss Quincey was a pathological abstraction, Miss Vivian
was a radiant reality; it was clear that Miss Quincey was not urgent,
and that once safe in her bed she could very well wait till to-morrow;
but when he thought of Miss Vivian he became impressed with the

gravity and interest of Miss Quincey's case.
While the doctor was making up his mind, little Miss Quincey, in her
shabby back bedroom, lay waiting for him, trembling, fretting her
nerves into a fever, starting at imaginary footsteps, and entertaining all
kinds of dismal possibilities. She was convinced that she was going to
die, or worse still, to break down, to be a perpetual invalid. She thought
of several likely illnesses, beginning with general paralysis and ending
with anemia of the brain. It might be anemia of the brain, but she rather
thought it would be general paralysis, because this would be so much
the more disagreeable of the two. Anyhow Rhoda Vivian must have
thought she was pretty bad or she would not have called in a doctor. To
call in a doctor seemed to Miss Quincey next door to invoking
Providence itself; it was the final desperate resort, implying catastrophe
and the end of all things. Oh, dear! Miss Quincey wished he would
come up if he was coming, and get it over.
After all he did not keep her waiting long, and it was over in five
minutes. And yet it was amazing the amount of observation, and insight,
and solid concentrated thought the young man contrived to pack into
those five minutes.
Well--it seemed that it was not general paralysis this time, nor yet
anemia of the brain; but he could tell her more about it in the morning.
Meanwhile she had nothing to do but to do what he told her and stay
where she was till he saw her again. And he was gone before she
realized that he had been there.
Again? So he was coming again, was he? Miss Quincey did not know
whether to be glad or sorry. His presence had given her a rare and
curiously agreeable sense of protection, but she had to think of the
expense. She had to think too of what Mrs. Moon would say to it--of
what she would say to him.
Mrs. Moon had a good deal to say to it. She took Juliana's illness as a
personal affront, as a deliberate back-handed blow struck at the
memory of Tollington Moon. With all the base implications of her
daily acts, Juliana had never attempted anything like this.

"Capers and nonsense," she said, "Juliana has never had an illness in
her life."
She said it to Rhoda Vivian, the bold young person who had taken upon
herself to bring the doctor into the house. Mrs. Moon spoke of the
doctor as if he was a disease.
Fortunately Miss Vivian was by when he endured the first terrifying
encounter. Her manner suggested that she took him under her
protection, stood between him and some unfathomable hostility.
He found the Old Lady disentangling herself with immense dignity
from her maze of furniture. Mrs. Moon was a small woman shrunk with
her eighty years, shrunk almost to extinction in her black woollen gown
and black woollen mittens. Her very face seemed to be vanishing under
the immense shadow of her black net cap. Spirals of thin grey hair
stuck flat to her forehead; she wore other and similar spirals enclosed
behind glass in an enormous brooch; it was the hair of her ancestors,
that is to say of the Quinceys. As the Old Lady looked at Cautley her
little black eyes burned like pinpoints pierced in a paste-board mask.
"I think you've been brought here on a wild goose chase, doctor," said
she, "there is nothing the matter with my niece."
He replied (battling sternly with his desire to laugh) that he would be
delighted if it were so; adding that a wild goose chase was the sport he
preferred to any other.
Here he looked