“I don’t believe a word of it!”
“But, Helen, the doctor ought to know.”
“Of course he ought to know, but does he know? If doctors agreed among themselves, I’d have more use for them. A poor patient has to submit to having everything the doctors are interested in for the time being. A specialist can always find you suffering with his specialty. Didn’t old Dr. Davis treat Father for malaria because he himself, forsooth, happened to be born in the Dismal Swamp, got malaria into his system when he was a baby and never got it out? All his patients must have malaria, too, because Dr. Davis has it.”
“Yes, Helen, that is so, but you see Father’s symptoms were like malaria in a way,” and Douglas Carter could not help laughing at her sister, although she well knew that the last doctor’s diagnosis of her father’s case was no laughing matter.
“Oh, yes, and then the next one, that bushy-whiskered one with his stomach pump and learned talk of an excess of hydrochlorics! Of course he found poor dear Daddy had a stomach, though he had never before been aware of it. All the Carters are such ostriches – ”
“So we are if we blindly bury our heads in the sand and refuse to see that this last doctor is right, and – ”
“I meant ostrich stomachs and not brains.”
“Shhh! Here come the children! Let’s don’t talk about it before them yet. They’ll have to know soon enough.” And Douglas, the eldest of the five Carters, tried to smooth her troubled brow and look as though she and Helen had been discussing the weather.
“Know what? I’m going, too, if it’s a movie,” declared Lucy, a long-legged, thirteen-year-old girl who reminded one of nothing so much as a thorough-bred colt – a colt conscious of its legs but meaning to make use of those same legs to out-distance all competitors in the race to be run later on.
“I don’t believe it’s movies,” said Nan, the fifteen-year-old sister, noting the serious expression of Douglas’s usually calm countenance. “I believe something has happened. Is it Bobby?” That was the very small brother, the joy and torment of the whole family.