Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/435

Rh was no longer a suffering, agonizing creature: she was a case—a beautiful case. As the problem developed new intricacies, becoming more and more of a challenge to his faculties of observation and inference, Justine saw the abstract scientiﬁc passion supersede his personal feeling of pity. Though his professional skill made him exquisitely tender to the patient under his hands, he seemed hardly conscious that she was a woman who had befriended him, and whom he had so lately seen in the brightness of health and enjoyment. This view was normal enough—it was, as Justine knew, the ideal state of mind for the successful physician, in whom sympathy for the patient as an individual must often impede swift choice and unfaltering action. But what she shrank from was his resolve to save Bessy’s life—a resolve fortiﬁed to the point of exasperation by the scepticism of the consulting surgeons, who saw in it only the youngster’s natural desire to distinguish himself by performing a feat which his elders deemed impossible.

As the days dragged on, and Bessy’s sufferings increased, Justine longed for a protesting word from Dr. Garford or one of his colleagues. In her hospital experience she had encountered cases where the useless agonies of death were mercifully shortened by the physician; why was not this a case for such treatment? The answer was simple enough—in the [ 419 ]