But Kern cried bitterly at the threat of a hospital, and Mr. V.V. instantly promised that she shouldn’t stir a foot from where he was.  He didn’t mean that she should suffer by it, either.  But it would be a strange thing if he, a resident physician with the riches of the world behind him (practically speaking), could not do all that a hospital could do, and perhaps that little more beside that might make all the difference....

There followed a day of intense activity, and at the end of that time—­behold the power of money in the bank, so decried by transcendentalists.

Mrs. Garland slept alone in a new room containing the sway-backed double bed, and (to tell the truth) not one earthly thing besides.  Kern slept in a brand-new single bed of white iron, new-mattressed and sheeted, and not far away stood another bed exactly like it.  Beside Kern’s bed stood a table holding glasses and bottled milk and thermometer and cracked ice and charts and liquid diet.  In one of the windows stood three potted geraniums, growing nicely and bright red.  Another window, where the noonday sun shone in too warmly, was fitted with a red-striped awning; and in a third—­for the pleasant old room, at the extreme back of the house, had no less than four of them—­a baby electric fan, operated from a storage battery, ran musically hour by hour.  And through all these marvels moved the biggest and most incredible marvel of all:  a lady in a blue-and-white dress and long apron, with spectacles and a gentle voice, who was paid twenty-five dollars a week to wait upon and give sponge baths to her, Kern Garland.

Yes, you could do something with one thousand dollars put into a checking account, and fourteen thousand more waiting behind that on a certificate of deposit.  But was it not the irony of life, was it not life itself, that the little buncher, who only the other day would have thrilled to her marrow at the mere thought of all these things, should have won her lady’s glories only when she was too strangely listless to care for them?...

Mrs. Garland feebly protested against the doctor’s staggering expenditures, as in duty bound, but was silenced when he told her that, by a lucky chance, he had a fund given him by a benevolent relative for just such cases.  The doctor took advantage of the interview to announce a stiff raise in board-charges, saying, in quite a censorious way, that he had been expecting for some time to hear a demand from her for such an increase.  As it was, through her failure to protect her own interests, she and Kern had been doing the full duties of an office-boy for him, doing them, he might say, faithfully and well, without compensation of any sort whatsoever.  This imposition must cease at once.

“Again,” said he, “I am growing—­somewhat heartier.  I am quite aware that I eat more.  I say that thirty-five dollars a month, and probably more, is the proper amount for me to pay.”