“Of all unfortunate times!” lamented Mrs. Clyde, her piquant face twisted to an expression of comic despair. “Why couldn’t he have given us a little more notice?”

Impatiently she tossed aside the telegram which announced that her husband’s old friend, Oren Taylor, the artist, would arrive at seven o’clock that evening.

“Don’t let it bother you, dear,” said Clyde. “I’ll take him to the club for dinner.”

“You can’t. Have you forgotten that I’ve invited Louise Ennis for her quarterly—well—visitation?”

Clyde whistled. “That’s rather a poser. What business have I got to have a cousin like Louise, anyway!”

Upon this disloyal observation Dr. Strong walked into the library. He was a very different Dr. Strong from the nerve-shaken wanderer who had dropped from nowhere into the Clyde household a year previous as its physician on the Chinese plan of being employed to keep the family well. The painful lines of the face were smoothed out. There was a deep light of content, the content of the man who has found his place and filled it, in the level eyes; and about the grave and controlled set of the mouth a sort of sensitive buoyancy of expression. The flesh had hardened and the spirit softened in him.

“Did you hear that, Strong?” inquired Mr. Clyde, turning to him.

“I have trained ears,” answered Dr. Strong solemnly. “They’re absolutely impervious to any speech not intended for them.”

“Open them to this: Louise Ennis is invited for dinner to-night. So is my old friend Oren Taylor, who wires to say that he’s passing through town.”

“Is that Taylor, the artist of ‘The First Parting’? I shall enjoy meeting him.”

“Well, you won’t enjoy meeting Cousin Louise,” declared Mr. Clyde. “We ask her about four times a year, out of family piety. You’ve been lucky to escape her thus far.”

“Rather a painful old party, your cousin?” inquired the physician, smilingly, of Clyde.

“Old? Twenty-two,” said Mrs. Clyde. “But she looks fifty and feels a hundred.”

“Allowing for feminine exaggeration,” amended Clyde.

“But what’s so wrong with her?” demanded the physician.

“Nerves,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Stomach,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Headaches,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Toe-aches,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Too much money,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Too much ego,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Dyspepsia.”

“Hypochondria.”

“Chronic inertia.”

“Set it to music,” suggested Dr. Strong, “and sing it as a duet of disease, from ablepsy to zymosis, inclusively. I shall be immensely interested to observe this prodigy of ills.”

“You’ll have plenty of opportunity,” said Mrs. Clyde rather maliciously. “You’re to sit next to her at dinner to-night.”

“Then put Bettykin on the other side of me,” he returned. “With that combination of elf, tyrant, and angel close at hand, I can turn for relief from the grave to the cradle.”

“Indeed you cannot. Louise can’t endure children. She says they get on her nerves. My children!”

“Now you have put the finishing touch to your character sketch,” observed Dr. Strong. “A woman of child-bearing age who can’t endure children—well, she is pretty far awry.”

“Yet I can remember Louise when she was a sweet, attractive young girl,” sighed Mrs. Clyde. “That was before her mother died, and left her to the care of a father too busy making money to do anything for his only child but spend it on her.”

“You’re talking about Lou Ennis, I know,” said Grandma Sharpless, who had entered in time to hear the closing words.

“Yes,” said. Dr. Strong. “What is our expert diagnostician’s opinion of the case? You know I always defer to you, ma’am, on any problem that’s under the surface of things.”

“None of your soft sawder, young man!” said the old lady, her shrewd, gray eyes twinkling from her shrewd, pink face. “My opinion of Louise Ennis? I’ll give it to you in two words. Just spoiled.”

“Taking my warning as I find it,” remarked the physician, rising, “I shall now retire to put on some chain armor under my evening coat, in case the Terrible Cousin attempts to stab me with an oyster-fork.”

The dinner was not, as Mrs. Clyde was forced to admit afterward, by any means the dismal function which she had anticipated. Oren Taylor, an easy, discursive, humorous talker, set the pace and was ably seconded by Grandma Sharpless, whose knack of incisive and pointed comment served to spur him to his best. Dr. Strong, who said little, attempted to draw Miss Ennis into the current of talk, and was rewarded with an occasional flash of rather acid wit, which caused the artist to look across the table curiously at the girl. So far as he could do so without rudeness, the physician studied his neighbor.

He saw a tall, amply-built girl, with a slackened frame whose muscles had forgotten how to play their part properly in holding the structure firm. Her face was flaccid. Under the large but dull eyes, there was a bloodless puffiness. Discontent sat enthroned at the corners of the sensitive mouth. A faint, reddish eruption disfigured her chin. Her two strong assets, beautifully even teeth and a wealth of soft, fine hair, failed wholly to save her from being a flatly repellent woman. Dr. Strong noted further that her hands were incessantly uneasy, and that she ate little and without interest. Also she seemed, in a sullen way, shy. Yet, despite all of these drawbacks, there was a pathetic suggestion of inherent fineness about her; of qualities become decadent through disuse; a charm that should have been, thwarted and perverted by a slovenly habit of life. Dr. Strong set her down as a woman at war with herself, and therefore with her world.

After dinner Mr. and Mrs. Clyde slipped away to see the children. The artist followed Dr. Strong, to whom he had taken a liking, as most men did, into the small lounging-room, where he lighted a cigar.

“Too bad about that Miss Ennis, isn’t it?” said Taylor abruptly.

His companion looked at him interrogatively.

“Such a mess,” he continued. “Such a ruin. Yet so much left that isn’t ruined. That face would be worth a lot to me for the ‘Poet’s Cycle of the Months’ that I’m painting now. What a November she’d make; ‘November, the withered mourner of glories dead and gone.’ Only I suppose she’d resent being asked to sit.”

“Illusions are the last assets that a woman loses,” agreed Dr. Strong.

“To think,” pursued the painter, “of what her Maker meant her to be, and of how she has belied it! She’s essentially and fundamentally a beautiful woman; that is why I want her for a model.”

‘“In the structure of her face, perhaps—”

“Yes; and all through. Look at the set of her shoulders, and the lines of her when she walks. Nothing jerry-built about her! She’s got the contours of a goddess and the finish of a mud-pie. It’s maddening.”

“More maddening from the physician’s point of view than from the artist’s. For the physician knows how needless it all is.”

“Is she your patient?”

“If she were I’d be ashamed to admit it. Give me military authority and a year’s time and if I couldn’t fix her so that she’d be proud to pose for your picture—Good Heavens!”

From behind the drapery of the passageway appeared Louise Ennis. She took two steps toward the two men and threw out her hands in an appeal which was almost grotesque.

“Is it true?” she cried, turning from one to the other. “Tell me, is it really true?”

“My dear young lady,” groaned Taylor, “what can I say to palliate my unpard—”

“Nevermind that! I don’t care. I don’t care anything about it. It’s my own fault. I stopped and listened. I couldn’t help it. It means so much to me. You can’t know. No man can understand. Is it true that I—that my face—”

Oren Taylor was an artist in more than his art: he possessed the rare sense of the fit thing to do and say.

“It is true,” he answered quietly, “that I have seen few faces more justly and beautifully modeled than yours.”

“And you,” she said, whirling upon Dr. Strong. “Can you do what you said? Can you make me good-looking?”

“Not I. But you yourself can.”

“Oh, how? What must I do? D—d—don’t think me a fool!” She was half-sobbing now. “It may be silly to long so bitterly to be beautiful. But I’d give anything short of life for it.”

“Not silly at all,” returned Dr. Strong emphatically. “On the contrary, that desire is rooted in the profoundest depths of sex.”

“And is the best excuse for art as a profession,” said the painter, smiling.

“Only tell me what to do,” she besought. “Gently,” said Dr. Strong. “It can’t be done in a day. And it will be a costly process.”

“That doesn’t matter. If money is all—”

“It isn’t all. It’s only a drop in the bucket. It will cost you dear in comfort, in indulgence, in ease, in enjoyment, in habit—”

“I’ll obey like a child.” Again her hands went tremulously out to him; then she covered her face with them and burst into the tears of nervous exhaustion.

“This is no place for me,” said the artist, and was about to escape by the door, when Mrs. Clyde blocked his departure.

“Ah, you are in here,” she said gayly. “I’d been wondering—Why, what’s the matter? What is it?”

“There has been an unfortunate blunder,” said Dr. Strong quickly. “I said some foolish things which Miss Ennis overheard—”

“No,” interrupted the painter. “The fault was mine—” And in the same breath Louise Ennis cried:—

“I didn’t overhear! I listened. I eavesdropped.”

“Are you quite mad, all of you?” demanded the hostess. “Won’t somebody tell me what has happened?”

“It’s true,” said the girl wildly; “every word they said. I am a mess.”

Mrs. Clyde’s arms went around the girl. Sex-loyalty raised its war signal flaring in her cheeks.

“Who said that?” she demanded, in a tone of which Dr. Strong observed afterward, “I never before heard a woman roar under her breath.”

“Never mind who said it,” retorted the girl. “It’s true anyway. It wasn’t meant to hurt me. It didn’t hurt me. He is going to cure me; Dr. Strong is.”

“Cure you, Louise? Of what?”

“Of ugliness. Of hideousness. Of being a mess.”

“But, my dear,” said the older woman softly, “you mustn’t take it to heart so, the idle word of some one who doesn’t know you at all.”

“You can’t understand,” retorted the other passionately. “You’ve always been pretty!”

“A compliment straight from the heart,” murmured the painter.

The color came into Mrs. Clyde’s smooth cheek again. “What have you promised her, Dr. Strong?” she asked.

“Nothing. I have simply followed Mr. Taylor’s lead. His is the artist eye that can see beauty beneath disguises. He has told Miss Ennis that she was meant to be a beautiful woman. I have told her that she can be what she was meant to be if she wills, and wills hard enough.”

“And you will take charge of her case?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“That, of course, depends upon you and Mr. Clyde. If you will include Miss Ennis in the family, my responsibilities will automatically extend to her.”

“Most certainly,” said Mrs. Clyde. “And now, Mr. Taylor,” she added, answering a look of appeal from that uncomfortable gentleman, “come and see the sketches. I really believe they are Whistler’s.”

As they left, Dr. Strong looked down at Louise Ennis with a smile.

“At present I prescribe a little cold water for those eyes,” said he. “And then some general conversation in the drawing-room. Come here tomorrow at four.”

“No,” said she. “I want to begin at once.”

“So as to profit by the impetus of the first enthusiasm? Very well. How did you come here this evening?”

“In my limousine.”

“Sell it.”

“Sell my new car? At this time of year?”

“Store it, then.”

“And go about on street-cars, I suppose?”

“Not at all. Walk.”

“But when it rains?”

“Run.”

Eagerness died out of Louise Ennis’s face. “Oh, I know,” she said pettishly. “It’s that old, old exercise treatment. Well, I’ve tried that, and if you think—”

She stopped in surprise, for Dr. Strong, walking over to the door, held the portiÈre aside.

“After you,” he said courteously.

“Is that all the advice you have for me?” she persisted.

“After you,” he repeated.

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said sulkily. “What is it you want me—”

“Pardon me,” he interrupted in uncompromising tones. “I am sure they are waiting for us in the other room.”

“You are treating me like a spoiled child,” declared Miss Ennis, stamping a period to the charge with her high French heel.

“Precisely.”

She marched out of the room, and, with the physician, joined the rest of the company. For the remainder of the evening she spoke little to any one and not at all to Dr. Strong. But when she came to say good-night he was standing apart. He held out his hand, which she could not well avoid seeing.

“When you get up to-morrow,” he said, “look in the mirror, [she winced] and say, ‘I can be beautiful if I want to hard enough.’ Good-bye.”

Luncheon at the Clydes’ next day was given up to a family discussion of Miss Louise Ennis, precipitated by Mr. Clyde, who rallied Dr. Strong on his newest departure.

“Turned beauty doctor, have you?” he taunted good-humoredly.

“Trainer, rather,” answered Dr. Strong.

“You might be in better business,” declared Mrs. Sharpless, with her customary frankness. “Beauty is only skin-deep.”

“Grandma Sharpless’s quotations,” remarked Dr. Strong to the saltcellar, “are almost as sure to be wrong as her observations are to be right.”

“It was a wiser man than you or I who spoke that truth about beauty.”

“Nonsense! Beauty only skin-deep, indeed! It’s liver-deep anyway. Often it’s soul-deep. Do you think you’ve kept your good looks, Grandma Sharpless, just by washing your skin?”

“Don’t you try to dodge the issue by flattery, young man,” said the old lady, the more brusquely in that she could see her son-in-law grinning boyishly at the mounting color in her face. “I’m as the Lord made me.”

“And as you’ve kept yourself, by clean, sound living. Miss Ennis isn’t as the Lord made her or meant her. She’s a mere parody of it. Her basic trouble is an ailment much more prevalent among intelligent people than they are willing to admit. In the books it is listed under various kinds of hyphenated neurosis; but it’s real name is fool-in-the-head.”

“Curable?” inquired Mr. Clyde solicitously.

“There’s no known specific except removing the seat of the trouble with an axe,” announced Dr. Strong. “But cases sometimes respond to less heroic treatment.”

“Not this case, I fear,” put in Mrs. Clyde. “Louise will coddle herself into the idea that you have grossly insulted her. She won’t come back.”

“Won’t she!” exclaimed Mrs. Sharpless. “Insult or no insult, she would come to the bait that Dr. Strong has thrown her if she had to crawl on her knees.”

Come she did, prompt to the hour. From out the blustery February day she lopped into the physician’s pleasant study, slumped into a chair, and held out to him a limp left hand, palm up and fingers curled. Ordinarily the most punctilious of men, Dr. Strong did not move from his stance before the fire. He looked at the hand.

“What’s that for?” he inquired.

“Aren’t you going to feel my pulse?”

“No.”

“Nor take my temperature?”

“No.”

“Nor look at my tongue?”

“Certainly not. I have a quite sufficient idea of what it looks like.”

The tone was almost brutal. Miss Ennis began to whimper.

“I’m a m—m—mess, I know,” she blubbered. “But you needn’t keep telling me so.”

“A mess can be cleared up,” said he more kindly, “under orders.”

“I’ll do whatever you tell me, if only—”

“Stop! There will be no ‘if’ about it. You will do as you are bid, or we will drop the case right here.”

“No, no! Don’t drop me. I will. I promise. Only, please tell me what is the matter with me.”

Dr. Strong, smiling inwardly, recalled the diagnosis he had announced to the Clydes, but did not repeat it.

“Nothing,” he said.

“But I know there must be. I have such strange symptoms. You can’t imagine.”

Fumbling in her hand-bag she produced a very elegant little notebook with a gold pencil attached. Dr. Strong looked at it with fascinated but ominous eyes.

“I’ve jotted down some of the symptoms here,” she continued, “just as they occurred. You see, here’s Thursday. That was a heart attack—”

“Let me see that book.”

She handed it to him. He carefully took the gold pencil from its socket and returned it to her.

“Now, is there anything in this but symptoms? Any addresses that you want to keep?”

“Only one: the address of a freckle and blemish remover.”

“We’ll come to that later. Meantime—” He tossed the book into the heart of the coal fire where it promptly curled up and perished.

“Why—why—why—” gasped the visitor,—“how dare you? What do you mean? That is an ivory-bound, gold-mounted book. It’s valuable.”

“I told you, I believe, that the treatment would be expensive. This is only the beginning. Of all outrageous, unforgivable kinds of self-coddling, the hypochondria that keeps its own autobiography is the worst.”

Regrettable though it is to chronicle, Miss Ennis hereupon emitted a semi-yelp of rage and beat the floor with her high French heels. Instantly the doctor’s gaze shifted to her feet. Just how it happened she could not remember, but her right foot, unprotected, presently hit the floor with a painful thump, while the physician contemplated the shoe which he had deftly removed therefrom.

“Two inches and a half at least, that heel,” he observed. “Talk about the Chinese women torturing their feet!” He laid the offending article upon the hearth, set his own soundly shod foot upon it, and tweaked off two inches of heel with the fire-tongs. “Not so pretty,” he remarked, “but at least you can walk, and not tittup in that. Give me the other.”

Shocked and astounded into helplessness, she mechanically obeyed. He performed his rough-and-ready repairs, and handed it back to her.

“Speaking of walking,” he said calmly, “have you stored your automobile yet?”

“No! I—I—I—”

“After to-morrow I don’t want you to set foot in it. Now, then, we’re going to put you through a course of questioning. Ready?”

Miss Ennis settled back in her chair, with the anticipatory expression of one to whom the recital of her own woe is a lingering pleasure. “Perhaps if I told you,” she began, “just how I feel—”

“Never mind that. Do you drink?”

“No!” The answer came back on the rebound. “Humph!” Dr. Strong leaned over her. She turned her head away.

“You asked me as if you meant I was a drunkard,” she complained. “Once in a while, when I have some severe nervous strain to undergo, I need a stimulant.”

“Oh. Cocktail?”

“Yes. A mild one.”

“A mild cocktail! That’s a paradox I’ve never encountered. How often do you take these mild cocktails?”

“Oh, just occasionally.”

“Well, a meal is an occasion. Before meals?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted reluctantly.

“You didn’t have one here last night.”

“No.”

“And you ate almost nothing.”

“That is just it, you see. I need something: otherwise I have no appetite.”

“In other words, you have formed a drink habit.”

“Oh, Dr. Strong!” It was half reproach, half insulted innocence, that wail.

“After a cocktail—or two—or three,” he looked at her closely, but she would not meet his eyes, “you eat pretty well?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And then go to bed with a headache because you’ve stimulated your appetite to more food than your run-down mechanism can rightly handle.”

“I do have a good many headaches.”

“Do anything for them?”

“Yes. I take some harmless powders, sometimes.”

“Harmless, eh? A harmless headache powder is like a mild cocktail. It doesn’t exist. So you’re adding drug habit to drink habit. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to stop. It has begun to show on you already, in that puffy grayness under the eyes. All the coal-tar powders vitiate the blood as well as affect the heart. Sleep badly?”

“Very often.”

“Take anything for that?”

“You mean opiates? I’m not a fool, Doctor.”

“You mean you haven’t gone quite that far,” said the other grimly. “You’ve started in on two habits; but not the worst. Well, that’s all. Come back when you need to.”

Miss Ennis’s big, dull eyes opened wide. “Aren’t you going to give me anything? Any medicine?”

“You don’t need it.”

“Or any advice?”

Dr. Strong permitted himself a little smile at the success of his strategy. “Give it to yourself,” he suggested. “You showed, in flashes, during the dinner talk last night, that you have both wit and sense, when you choose to use them. Do it now.”

The girl squirmed uncomfortably. “I suppose you want me to give up cocktails,” she murmured in a die-away voice.

“Absolutely.”

“And try to get along with no stimulants at all?”

“By no means. Fresh air and exercise ad lib.”

“And to stop the headache powders?”

“Right; go on.”

“And to stop thinking about my symptoms?”

“Good! I didn’t reckon on your inherent sense in vain.”

“And to walk where I have been riding?”

“Rain or shine.”

“What about diet?”

“All the plain food you want, at any time you really want it, provided you eat slowly and chew thoroughly.”

“A la Fletcher?”

“Horace Fletcher is one of those fine fanatics whose extravagances correct the average man’s stolid stupidities. I’ve seen his fad made ridiculous, but never harmful. Try it out.”

“And you won’t tell me when to come back?”

“When you need to, I said. The moment the temptation to break over the rules becomes too strong, come. And—eh—by the way—eh—don’t worry about your mirror for a while.” Temporarily content with this, the new patient went away with new hope. Wiping his brow, the doctor strolled into the sitting-room where he found the family awaiting him with obvious but repressed curiosity.

“It isn’t ethical, I suppose,” said Mr. Clyde, “to discuss a patient’s case with outsiders?”

“You’re not outsiders. And she’s not my patient, in the ordinary sense, since I’m giving my services free. Moreover, I need all the help I can get.”

“What can I do?” asked Mrs. Clyde promptly. “Drop in at her house from time to time, and cheer her up. I don’t want her to depend upon me exclusively. She has depended altogether too much on doctors in the past.”

Mr. Clyde chuckled. “Did she tell you that the European medical faculty had chased her around to every spa on the Continent? Neurasthenic dyspepsia, they called it.”

“Pretty name! Seventy per cent of all dyspeptics have the seat of the imagination in the stomach. The difficulty is to divert it.”

“What’s your plan?”

“Oh, I’ve several, when the time comes. For the present I’ve got to get her around into condition.”

“Spoiled mind, spoiled body,” remarked Mrs. Sharpless.

“Exactly. And I’m going to begin on the body, because that is the easiest to set right. Look out for an ill-tempered cousin during the next fortnight.”

His prophecy was amply confirmed by Mrs. Clyde, who made it her business, amid multifarious activities, to drop in upon Miss Ennis with patient frequency. On the tenth day of the “cure,” Mrs. Clyde reported to the household physician:—

“If I go there again I shall probably slap her. She’s become simply unbearable.”

“Good!” said Dr. Strong. “Fine! She has had the nerve to stick to the rules. We needn’t overstrain her, though. I’ll have her come here tomorrow.”

Accordingly, at six o’clock in the evening of the eleventh day, the patient stamped into the office, wet, bedraggled, and angry.

“Now look!” she cried. “You made me store my motor-car. All the street-cars were crowded. My umbrella turned inside out. I’m a perfect drench. And I know I’ll catch my death of cold.” Whereupon she laid a pathetic hand on her chest and coughed hollowly.

“Stick out your foot,” ordered Dr. Strong. And, as she obeyed: “That’s well. Good, sensible storm shoes. I’ll risk your taking cold. How do you feel? Better?”

“No. Worse!” she snapped.

“I suppose so,” he retorted with a chuckle.

“What is more,” she declared savagely, “I look worse!”

“So your mirror has been failing in its mission of flattery. Too bad. Now take off your coat, sit right there by the fire, and in an hour you’ll be dry as toast.”

“An hour? I can’t stay an hour!”

“Why not?”

“It’s six o’clock. I must go home. Besides,” she added unguardedly, “I’m half starved.”

“Indeed! Had a cocktail to-day?”

“No. Certainly not.”

“Yet you have an appetite. A bad sign. Oh, a very bad sign—for the cocktail market.”

“I’m so tired all the time. And I wake up in the morning with hardly any strength to get out of bed—”

“Or the inclination? Which?” broke in the doctor.

“And my heart gives the queerest jumps and—”

“Thought we’d thrown that symptom-book into the fire. Stand up, please.”

She stood. Dr. Strong noted with satisfaction how, already, the lithe and well-set figure had begun to revert to its natural pose, showing that the muscles were beginning to do their work. He also noted that the hands, hitherto a mere mÉlange of nervously writhing fingers, hung easily slack.

“Your troubles,” he said pleasantly, “have only just begun. I think you’re strong enough now to begin work.”

“I’m not,” she protested, half weeping. “I feel faint this minute.”

“Good, healthy hunger. Of course, if a glance in your mirror convinces you that you’ve had enough of the treatment—”

Miss Ennis said something under her breath which sounded very much like “Brute!”

“Have you ever had a good sweat?” he asked abruptly.

Her lips curled superciliously. “I’m not given to perspiration, I’m thankful to—”

“Did I say ‘perspire’?” inquired he. “I understood myself to say ‘sweat.’ Have you ever—”

“No.”

“High time you began. Buy yourself the heaviest sweater you can find—you may call it a ‘perspirationer’ if you think the salesman will appreciate your delicacy—and I’ll be around to-morrow and set up a punching-bag for you.”

“What is that?”

“A device which you strike at. The blow forces it against a board and it returns and, unless you dodge nimbly, impinges upon your countenance. In other words, whacks you on the nose. Prizefighters use it.”

“I suppose you want me to be like a prizefighter.”

“The most beautiful pink-and-white skin and the clearest eye I’ve ever seen belonged to a middleweight champion. Yes, I’d like to see you exactly like him in that respect. One hour every day—”

“I simply can’t. I shan’t have time. With the walking I do now I’m busy all the morning and dead tired all the afternoon; and in the evening there is my bridge club—”

“Ah, you play bridge. For money?”

“Naturally we don’t play for counters.”

“Well, I’d give it up.”

“You are not employed as a censor of my morals, Dr. Strong.”

“No; but I’ve undertaken to censor your nerves. And gambling, for a woman in your condition, is altogether too much of a strain.”

The corners of Miss Ennis’s mouth quivered babyishly. “I’m sure, then, that working like a prizefighter will be too much strain. You’re wearing me out.”

“I’m a cruel tyrant,” mocked Dr. Strong; “and worse is to come. We’ll clear out a room in your house and put in not only the punching-bag, but also pulleys and a rowing-machine. And I’ll send up an athletic instructor to see that you use them.”

“I won’t have him. I’ll send him away!”

“By advice of your mirror?”

Miss Ennis frankly and angrily wept.

“Now I’ll tell you a secret about yourself.” Miss Ennis stopped weeping.

“Ninety-nine cases out of a hundred I couldn’t handle as I am handling your case. They would need a month’s rest and building up before they’d be fit for real work. But you are naturally a powerful, muscular woman with great physical endurance and resiliency. What I am trying to do is to take advantage of your splendid equipment to pull you out.”

“What would you do with the ordinary case?” asked the girl, interested.

“Oh, put her to bed, perhaps. Perhaps send her away to the woods. Maybe set a nurse over her to see that she didn’t take to writing her symptoms down in a book. Keep her on a rigid diet, and build her up by slow and dull processes. You may thank your stars that—”

“I don’t thank my stars at all!” broke in the patient, as her besetting vice of self-pity asserted itself. “I’d much rather do that than be driven like a galley-slave. I’m too tired to get any pleasure out of anything—”

“Even bridge?” interposed the tormentor softly.

“—and when night comes I fall into bed like a helpless log.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard yet. You’re progressing. Now take that new appetite of yours home to dinner. And don’t spoil it by eating too fast. Good-night.”

Fully a fortnight later Grandma Sharpless met Dr. Strong in the hallway as he came in from a walk.

“What have you been doing to Louise Ennis?” she demanded.

“Lots of things. What’s wrong now? Another fit of the sulks?”

“Worse,” said the old lady in a stage whisper. “She’s got paint on her face.”

Dr. Strong laughed. “Really? It might be worse. In fact, as a symptom, it couldn’t be better.”

“Young man, do you mean to tell me that face-paint is a good thing for a young woman?”

“Oh, no. It’s vulgar and tawdry, as a practice. But I’m glad to know that Miss Ennis has turned to it, because it shows that she recognizes her own improvement and is trying to add to it.”

“But the stuff will ruin her skin,” cried the scandalized old lady. “See what dreadful faces women have who use it. Look at the actresses—”

“Well, look at them!” broke in the physician. “There is no class of women in the world with such beautiful skin as the women of the stage. And that in spite of hard work, doubtful habits of eating, and irregular hours. Do you know why?”

“I suppose you’ll tell me that paint does it,” said Mrs. Sharpless with a sniff.

“Not the paint itself. But the fact that in putting it on and taking it off, they maintain a profound cleanliness of skin which the average woman doesn’t even understand. The real value of the successful skin-lotions and creams so widely exploited lies in the massage which their use compels.”

“Aside from the stuff on her face,” remarked Mrs. Sharpless, “Louise looks like another woman, and acts like one. She came breezing in here like a young cyclone.”

“Which means trouble,” sighed Dr. Strong. “Now that her vitality is returning, it will demand something to feed on. Well, we shall see.”

He found his patient standing—not sitting, this time—before the fireplace, with a face of gloom. Before he could greet her, she burst out:—

“How long am I to be kept on the grind? I see nobody. I have nothing to amuse me. I’ve had a row with father.” Dr. Strong smiled. “The servants are impertinent.” The smile broadened. “The whole world is hateful!” The doctor’s face was now expanded into a positive grin. “I despise everything and everybody! I’m bored.”

“Passing that over for the moment for something less important,” said Dr. Strong smoothly, “where do you buy your paint?”

“I don’t paint!” retorted the girl hotly.

“Well, your rouge. Your skin-rejuvenator. Your essence of bloom of youth or whatever poetic name you call it by. Let me see the box.” Mutiny shone from the scowling face, but her hand went to her reticule and emerged with a small box. It passed to the physician’s hand and thence to the fire. “I’ll use paint if I want to,” declared the girl. “Undoubtedly. But you’ll use good paint if you use any. Get a theatrical paper, read the ads, and send for the highest grade of grease-paint. I won’t say anything about the vulgarity of the practice because I’m not censoring your manners. I’ll only state that three months from now you won’t want or need paint. Did you get this stuff,” he nodded toward the fireplace whence issued a highly perfumed smoke, “from that address in your deceased symptom-book?”

“Yes.”

“That was the firm which advertised to remove pimples, wasn’t it?”

Miss Ennis shrank. “Pimple is an inexcusable word,” she protested.

“Word? We’re dealing in realities now. And pimples were an inexcusable reality in your case, because they were the blossoms of gluttony, torpor, and self-indulgence.”

He leaned forward and looked closely at her chin. The surface, once blotched and roughened, was now of a smooth and soft translucency. “You once objected to the word ‘sweat,’” he continued. “Well, it has eliminated the more objectionable word ‘pimple’ from your reckoning. And it has done the job better than your blemish-remover—-which leaves scars.”

Her hand went to her temple, where there was a little group of silvery-white patches on the skin. “Can’t you fix that?” she asked anxiously.

“No. Your ‘remover’ was corrosive sublimate. It certainly removed the blemish. It would also have removed your entire face if you had used enough of it. Nothing can restore what the liquid fire has burned away. That’s the penalty you pay for foolish credulousness. Fortunately, it is where it won’t show much.”

Gloom surged back into her face. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she fretted. “I’m still a mess in looks even if I don’t feel so much like one.”

“One half of looks is expression,” stated the doctor didactically. “I don’t like yours. What’s your religion?”

His patient stared. “Why, I’m a Presbyterian, I suppose.”

“Humph! You suppose! It doesn’t seem to have struck in very hard. Any objection to going to a Christian Science church?”

“Christian Science! I thought the regular doctors considered it the worst kind of quackery.”

“The regular doctors,” returned Dr. Strong quickly, “once considered anaesthesia, vaccination, and the germ theory as quackery. We live and learn, like others. There’s plenty of quackery in Christian Science, and also quite a little good. And nowadays we’re learning to accept the good in new dogmas, and discard the bad.”

“And you really wish me to go to the Christian Science church?”

“Why not? You’ll encounter there a few wild fanatics. I’ll trust your hard common sense to guard you against their proselytizing. You’ll also meet a much larger number of sweet, gentle, and cheerful people, with a sweet, helpful, and cheerful philosophy of life. That’ll help to cure you.”

“And what will they cure me of, since you say I have no disease?”

“They’ll cure you of turning your mouth down at the corners instead of up.”

At this, the mouth referred to did, indeed, turn up at the corners, but in no very pleasant wise.

“You think they’ll amuse me?” she inquired contemptuously.

“Oh, as for amusement, I’ve arranged for that. You’re bored. Very well, I expected it. It’s a symptom, and a good one, in its place. I’ll get you a job.”

“Indeed! And if I don’t want a job?”

“No matter what you want. You need it.”

“Settlement work, I suppose.”

“Nothing so mild. Garbage inspection.”

“What!” Louise Ennis closed her eyes in expectation of a qualm of disgust. The qualm didn’t materialize. “What’s the matter with me?” she asked in naÏve and suppressed chagrin. “I ought to feel—well, nauseated.”

“Nonsense! Your nerves and stomach have found their poise. That’s all.”

“But what do I know about garbage?”

“You know it when you see it, don’t you? Now, listen. There has been a strike of the city teamsters. Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer, wants volunteers to inspect the city and report on where conditions are bad from day to day. You’ve got intelligence. You can outwalk nine men out of ten. And you can be of real service to the city. Besides, it’s doctor’s orders.”

The story of Louise Ennis’s part in the great garbage strike, and of her subsequent door-to-door canvass of housing conditions, has no place in this account. After the start, Dr. Strong saw little of her; but he heard much from Mrs. Clyde, who continued her frequent visits to the Ennis household; not so much, as she frankly admitted, for the purpose of furnishing bulletins to Dr. Strong, as because of her own growing interest in and affection for the girl. And, as time went on, Strong noticed that, on the occasions when he chanced to meet his patient on the street, she was usually accompanied by one or another of the presentable young men of the community, a fact which the physician observed with professional approval rather than personal gratification.

“It isn’t her health alone,” said Mrs. Clyde, when they were discussing her, one warm day in the ensuing summer. “These six months seem to have made a new person of her. Trust the children to find out character. Bettykins wants to spend half her time with Cousin Lou.”

“You’ve surely worked a transformation, Strong,” said Clyde. “But, of course, the raw material was there. You couldn’t do much for the average homely woman.”

“The average woman isn’t homely,” said Mrs. Clyde. “She’s got good looks either spoiled or undeveloped.”

“Perfectly true,” confirmed Dr. Strong. “Any young woman whose face isn’t actually malformed can find her place in the eternal scheme of beauty if she tries. Nature works toward beauty in all matters of sex. Where beauty doesn’t exist it is merely an error in Nature’s game.”

“Then the world is pretty full of errors,” said Mrs. Sharpless.

“Most of them aren’t Nature’s errors. They are the mistakes of the foolish human. Take almost any woman, not past the age of development, build up her figure to be supple and self-sustaining; give her a clear eye, quick-moving blood, fresh skin, and some interest in the game of life that shall keep mind and body alert—why, the radiant force of her abounding health would make itself felt in a blind asylum. And all this she can do for herself, with a little knowledge and a good deal of will.”

“But that isn’t exactly beauty, is it?” asked Clyde, puzzled.

“Isn’t it? In the soundest sense, I think it is. Anyway, put it this way: No woman who is wholly healthy, inside and out, can fail to be attractive.”

“I wish that painter-man could see Louise now, as an example,” said Grandma Sharpless.

“Oren Taylor?” said Mr. Clyde. “Why, he can. He goes East next week, and I’ll wire him to stop over.”

Oren Taylor arrived late on a warm afternoon. As he crossed the lawn, Louise Ennis was playing “catch” with Manny Clyde. Her figure swung and straightened with the lithe muscularity of a young animal. Her cheek was clear pink, deepening to the warmer color of the curved lips. The blue veins stood out a little against the warm, moist temples from which she brushed a vagrant lock of hair. Her eyes were wide and lustrous with the eager effort of the play, for the boy was throwing wide in purposeful delight over her swift gracefulness.

“Great Heavens!” exclaimed the artist, staring at her. “Who did that?”

“Strong did that,” explained Clyde; “as per specifications.”

“A triumph!” declared Taylor. “A work of art.”

“Oh, no,” said Dr. Strong; “a renewal of Nature.”

“In any case, a lady remade and better than new. My profound felicitations, Dr. Strong.” He walked over to the flushed and lovely athlete. “Miss Ennis,” he said abruptly, “I want your permission to stay over to-morrow and sketch you. I need you in my ‘Poet’s Cycle of the Months.’”

“How do you do, Mr. Taylor?” she returned demurely. “Of course you can sketch me, if it doesn’t interfere with my working hours.” A quick smile rippled across her face like sunlight across water. “The same subject?” she asked with mischievous nonchalance.

“No. Not even the same season,” he replied emphatically, coloring, as he bethought him of his “November, the withered mourner of glories dead and gone.”

“What part am I to play now?”

“Let Dr. Strong name it,” said Taylor with quick tact. “He has prepared the model.”

The girl turned to the physician, a little deeper tinge of color in her face.

“Referred to Swinburne,” said Strong lightly, and quoted:—

“When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces,

The mother of months in valley and plain

Fills the shadows and windy places

With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.”

“Atalanta,” said Oren Taylor, bowing low to her; “the maiden spirit of the spring.”