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She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita Haydock was admiring, at least. She swaggered on:

“I'm sure I'm going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner —— Is he a good doctor, Dr. Gould?”

Kennicott's rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner. “I'll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott.” He smiled at Kennicott, to imply that whatever he might say in the stress of being witty was not to count against him in the commercio-medical warfare. “There's some people in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin' diagnostician and prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you — but for heaven's sake don't tell him I said so — don't you ever go to him for anything more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the cardiograph.”

No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed, and Sam Clark's party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting duchesses. Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized. They looked as though they wondered whether they ought to look as though they disapproved. She concentrated on them: