"'Fancy me, in this frosty weather. Posing as Venus among the heather; Fancy me in the altogether, At my time of life!'"
"Really, Ned!" exclaimed Helen, unable to repress her smiles, "You are the most ridiculous boy. But if I am to see the domain it is time I began. I must be back by five o'clock."
They were but just in time when he set her down at the hospital and sought out Dr. Ramsay.
He found him writing for dear life, his face positively aglow with vitality and fire.
"Smashing 'em up?" asked Ned, after the first welcome was over and he had lit a cigarette.
Peter Ramsay shifted the papers a trifle shamefacedly. "Yes!" he replied; "it isn't a bit of good, of course; but it relieves my feelings and hurts theirs."
"Didn't Mrs. Tressilian tell you? Well, I suppose I have been a bit of a fool--and yet, I don't see quite what else I could have done. I tell you, Blackborough, there isn't a spot in England on which you can tread firmly without crushing a vested interest. Take, for instance, that pint of beer business. I suppose you know that every one in this hospital is entitled to one pint of beer a day--typhoid fever patients, dying patients--the whole stock, lock, and barrel of nurses, doctors, porters, and such like. If the beer isn't drunk it's at any rate paid for. Think of the vested interests that means. So when I suggested retrenchments, and took the trouble to lay the German and even the Scotch figures before the governors--it costs a third less at least to run a patient in Scotland--there was the devil and all to pay; and--and some one made disparaging remarks about porridge, and so, of course, there was a row...."
"Then about the operation." Peter Ramsay got up and began to walk about the room, and his voice became more argumentative. "You see, it was done, and the man died. Well, I wrote an account of it for the medical paper at Vienna, and some one got hold of it and translated it--well! not quite fairly. You see, it was a question whether a certain lesion--but that's a technical detail--I hadn't approved at the time, and I said so; and they made out I asserted the man had been killed through incompetence. All I meant was that it wasn't a fair test of the feasibility of the operation, and it wasn't. I tried to smooth them over, but, as I said at the time, one must tell the truth sometimes."