end, with shattered health, to the door of the great specialist in lung
diseases. At this day he could shut his eyes and summon back with
distinctness the smallest detail of the interview. He went over again
his tedious wait in the outer office--the scattered magazines upon the
table, the utterly inartistic prints upon the wall, the ticking of the
tall bronze clock on the mantel, and even the number of the page he had
been reading in a periodical, for--following a methodical habit--he had
unconsciously made a mental note of the figures when he laid the
magazine aside to face the examination behind the folding doors. With
the patient attention to minutia which was a part of his literary
instinct, his memory followed the great man across the ugly yellow
squares in the carpet and fixed itself upon a row of small green bottles
standing in a wooden rack upon the table. Through the half hour of his
visit, which brief as it was casually dismissed him to his death, those
slender green phials seemed to his fancy to hold an absurd and grotesque
prominence. "In a climate like this I'd give you three years--maybe a
little longer--yes, I think I may grant a little longer," the great man
had remarked, with what seemed to Adams a ridiculous assumption of
yielding a concession. "In a dryer air you might even be good, we may
say, until thirty-five or forty." He shrugged his shoulders with a
gesture intended to convey his sympathy but which succeeded only in
expressing his personal importance, and Adams had walked out from the
stuffy little ether-smelling office with a feeling curiously like that
he had known as a boy when during a school game of football, he found
himself suddenly thumped upon the heart. On the doorstep he had stopped
and laughed aloud, struck by the persistency with which the green
bottles dominated his impressions.

After this there had come a blank of a few weeks--a blank of which he
remembered nothing except that he had struggled like an entrapped beast