Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/156

 "Different schools," he cried. "Different schools! You're talking arrant bosh! Your sort don't belong to any school under heaven. The Lord knows there's no love lost betwixt me and the homœopaths. They're a wrong-headed lot, and I should like to see the whole wretched fallacy uprooted and cast to the winds. But there are scientific men among them, who are neither knaves nor fools, and I won't have any body of scientific men insulted. Such men as you are the curse of any school—it is such men as you who have brought it into disrepute—it is such men as you"

"For God's sake, stop!"

The doctor turned, suddenly ashamed of his torrent of words, and looked at Anson, who had stopped in his walk, and stood clutching a thin rail fence, which creaked and wavered in his grasp. In the dim starlight his face looked drawn and deathly white.

"Do you feel ill?" asked the doctor.

"Yes, mortally ill," said Anson, with a harsh laugh. "If you had a pistol about you, I think I could cure my own case quicker than you could."

"Here, take my arm—I'm afraid I was a brute."

"We're all brutes together," said Anson. "I don't want your arm. It isn't my body that you've butchered," and he walked toward his buggy and began fumbling with the hitching