“Well, there is one good thing,” said Mrs. Blanche Creamer; “Dick doesn’t get much out of that cousin of his this evening!  Doesn’t he look handsome, though?”

So Mrs. Blanche, being now a good deal taken up with her observations of those friends of hers and ours, began to be rather careless of her two old Doctors, who naturally enough fell into conversation with each other across the white surfaces of that lady,—­perhaps not very politely, but, under the circumstances, almost as a matter of necessity.

When a minister and a doctor get talking together, they always have a great deal to say; and so it happened that the company left the table just as the two Doctors were beginning to get at each other’s ideas about various interesting matters.  If we follow them into the other parlor, we can, perhaps, pick up something of their conversation.

CHAPTER XXII.

WHY DOCTORS DIFFER.

The company rearranged itself with some changes after leaving the tea-table Dudley Venner was very polite to the Widow; but that lady having been called off for a few moments for some domestic arrangement, he slid back to the side of Helen Darley, his daughter’s faithful teacher.  Elsie had got away by herself, and was taken up in studying the stereoscopic Lahcoon.  Dick, being thus set free, had been seized upon by Mrs. Blanche Creamer, who had diffused herself over three-quarters of a sofa and beckoned him to the remaining fourth.  Mr. Bernard and Miss Letty were having a snug tete-a-tete in the recess of a bay-window.  The two Doctors had taken two armchairs and sat squared off against each other.  Their conversation is perhaps as well worth reporting as that of the rest of the company, and, as it was earned on in a louder tone, was of course more easy to gather and put on record.

It was a curious sight enough to see those two representatives of two great professions brought face to face to talk over the subjects they had been looking at all their lives from such different points of view.  Both were old; old enough to have been moulded by their habits of thought and life; old enough to have all their beliefs “fretted in,” as vintners say,—­thoroughly worked up with their characters.  Each of them looked his calling.  The Reverend Doctor had lived a good deal among books in his study; the Doctor, as we will call the medical gentleman, had been riding about the country for between thirty and forty years.  His face looked tough and weather-worn; while the Reverend Doctor’s, hearty as it appeared, was of finer texture.  The Doctor’s was the graver of the two; there was something of grimness about it,—­partly owing to the northeasters he had faced for so many years, partly to long companionship with that stern personage who never deals in sentiment or pleasantry.  His speech was apt to be brief and peremptory; it was a way he had got by ordering patients; but he could discourse somewhat, on occasion,