“I think you’re big enough to take this, so I’m going to spell it out. In these four walls, aside from me, you haven’t a single friend.”

At first he had not believed it. Then because, above all, he was supremely honest, he had admitted to himself that the fact was true.

Then the principal had said, “You’re a brilliant scholar. You know it and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. As to what’s ahead, you can be anything you choose. You have a remarkably superior mind, Coleman—I may say, unique in my experience. But I warn you: if you want to live with others, sometimes you’ll have to seem less superior than you are.”

It was a daring thing to say to a young, impressionable man. But the master had not underrated his pupil. Coleman went away with the advice, digested it, analyzed it, and finished up despising himself.

From then on he had worked harder than ever—to rehabilitate himself with a planned program almost of self-mortification. He had begun with games. From as far back as he could remember David Coleman had disliked sports of every kind. At school, so far, he had never participated, and he inclined to the opinion that people who went to sports events and cheered were rather stupid juveniles. But now he turned up at practice—football in winter, baseball in summer. Despite his own first feelings he became expert. At college he found himself in the first teams. And when not playing, as a supporter in college and high school he attended every game, cheering as loudly as the rest.

Yet he was never able to play without a feeling of indifference to games, which he carefully concealed. And he never cheered without an inward uneasiness that he was behaving childishly. It was this which made him believe that, though he had humbled pride, he had never banished it.

His relationship with people had gone much the same way. In the old days, on meeting someone whom he considered intellectually inferior, he had never bothered to conceal his boredom or disinterest. But now, as part of his plan, he went out of his way to be cordial to such people. As a result, in college he had taken on the reputation of a friendly sage. It had become a password among those in academic difficulties to say, “Let’s have a bull session with David Coleman. He’ll straighten us out.” And invariably he did.

By all normal thinking the process should have shaped his feelings for people into a kindlier mold. Time and experience should have made him sympathetic to those less gifted than himself. But he was never sure that it had. Within himself Coleman found he still had the old contempt for mental incompetence. He concealed it, fought it with iron discipline and good acting, but, it seemed, it would never go away.

He had gone into medicine partly because his father, now dead, had been a country doctor and partly because it was something he had always wanted to do himself. But in entering a specific field he had chosen pathology because it was generally considered the least glamorous of the specialties. It was part of his own deliberate process of beating down the inevitable pride.

For a while he believed he had succeeded. Pathology is at times a lonely specialty, cut off as it is from the excitements and pressures of direct contact with hospital patients. But later, as interest and knowledge grew, he found the old contempt returning for those who knew less than he of the hidden mysteries a high-powered microscope revealed. Not to the same extent, though, because inevitably in medicine he met minds which were a match for his own. And still later he found he could relax, lowering some of the iron self-discipline with which he had clad himself. He still met those whom he considered fools—even in medicine there were some. But he never showed it and found occasionally that contact with such people disturbed him less. With such relaxation he began to wonder if at last he had beaten down his old enemy.

He was still wary though. A program of deliberate self-adjustment which had lasted fifteen years was not easy to shake off suddenly. And at times he found it hard to decide whether his motives came from pure choice or were from the habit of sackcloth he had worn so patiently and for so long.

Thus the question to himself on his choice of Three Counties Hospital. Had he chosen it because this was what he really wanted—a medium-size, second-line hospital, without reputation or glamor? Or had it been an old subconscious feeling that here was where his pride would suffer most?

As he mailed the two letters he knew these were questions that only time could answer.

On the seventh floor of the Burlington Medical Arts Building, Elizabeth Alexander dressed herself in the examining room adjoining Dr. Dornberger’s office. In the last half-hour Charles Dornberger had given her his usual thorough physical examination, and now he had gone back to his desk. Through the partly opened door she heard him say, “Come and sit down when you’re ready, Mrs. Alexander.”

Pulling a slip over her head, she answered cheerfully, “I’ll just be a minute, Doctor.”

Seated at his desk, Dornberger smiled. He liked to have patients who were obviously enjoying pregnancy, and Elizabeth Alexander was. She’ll be a good no-nonsense mother, he thought. She seemed an attractive girl, not pretty in the conventional sense, but with a lively personality which more than compensated for it. He glanced at the notes he had recorded earlier; she was twenty-three. When he was a younger man he always took the precaution of having a nurse present when he did physicals on women patients. He had heard of physicians failing to do this and later having nasty accusations hurled at them by unbalanced women. Nowadays, though, he seldom bothered. That, at least, was one advantage of being old.

He called out, “Well, I’d say you’re going to have a normal, healthy baby. There don’t seem to be any complications.”

“That’s what Dr. Crossan said.” Fastening the belt of a summer green-print dress, Elizabeth emerged from the other room. She seated herself in a chair alongside the desk.

Dornberger checked his notes again. “He was your doctor in Chicago. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Did he deliver your first child?”

“Yes.” Elizabeth opened her purse and took out a slip of paper. “I have his address here, Doctor.”

“Thank you. I’ll write him for your medical history.” Dornberger clipped the paper to his notes. He said matter-of-factly, “What did your first baby die of, Mrs. Alexander?”

“Bronchitis. When she was a month old.” Elizabeth said it normally. A year ago the words would have been hard to bring out and she would have had to fight back tears. Now, with another baby coming, the loss seemed easier to accept. But this time her baby would live—of that she was determined.

Dr. Dornberger asked, “Was the delivery normal?”

“Yes,” she answered.

He returned to his notes. As if to counter any distress the questions might have caused, he said conversationally, “I understand you’ve just arrived in Burlington.”

“That’s right,” she said brightly, then added, “My husband is working at Three Counties.”

“Yes, Dr. Pearson was telling me.” Still writing, he asked, “How does he like it there?”

Elizabeth considered. “John hasn’t said too much. But I think he likes it. He’s very keen on his work.”

Dornberger blotted what he had written. “That’s a help. Particularly in pathology.” He looked up and smiled. “The rest of us depend very much on the work of the laboratories.”

There was a pause while the obstetrician reached in a drawer of his desk. Then, extracting a pad of forms, he said, “Talking of the lab, we must send you for a blood test.”

As he wrote on the top form Elizabeth said, “I meant to tell you, Doctor. I’m Rh negative and my husband is Rh positive.”

He laughed. “I should have remembered you were the wife of a technologist. We’ll have to make it a very thorough check.” He tore off the form and gave it to her. “You can take this to the outpatients’ department at Three Counties any time.”