eventually the dentist comes out in front once more and makes a
little curtain speech to you. He has just ascertained that what
the tooth really needed was not filling but pulling. He thought
at first that it should be filled and that is what he has been
doing--filling it--but now he knows that pulling is the indicated
procedure. He does not understand how a tooth that seemed so open
could have deceived him. Nevertheless he will now pull the tooth.

He pulls her. She does her level best but he pulls her. He
harvests small sections of the gum from time to time and
occasionally he stops long enough to loosen up the roots as far
down as your floating ribs. But he pulls her. He spares no pains
to pull that tooth. Or if he spares any you are not able
subsequently to remember what they were. You utter various loud
sounds in a strange and incomprehensible language and he lays back
and braces his knees against your lower jaw, and the tooth utters
the death rattle and begins picking the cover-lid. And then he
gives one final heave and breaks the roots away from the lower
part of your spinal column to which they were adhering, and emerges
into the open panting but triumphant, and holds his trophy up for
you to look at. If you didn't know it was your tooth you would
take it for an old-fashioned china cuspidor that had been neglected
by the janitor.

It was a tooth that you had been prizing for years, but now you
wouldn't have it as a gracious gift. You are through with that
tooth forever. You never want to see it again.

As for the dentist, he collects the fixed charge for stumpage and
corkage and one thing and another and you come away with a feeling