“Are you listening?”
“Yes, but it hasn’t begun.”
“That is true. We can really omit all this introduction and at once begin.”
As the pages succeeded each other her hunger and fatigue changed to a fever of anxious attention.
“Well? Is not that a masterly analysis? You see. That should be translated for your Wimpole Street.”
“I don’t know. We are not like that. It would never occur to an English doctor to write for the general public anything that could shake its confidence in doctors. Foreigners are different. They think nothing of revealing and discussing the most awful things. It’s pessimism. They like pessimism.”
“It is a serious mistake to regard enlightenment as pessimism.”
“I don’t believe in Continental luminaries.”
“Your prejudices are at least frank.”
“I had forgotten the author was Russian. That idea of the rush of mixed subjects coming to the medical student too quickly one after the other for anything to be taken in, is awful, and perfectly true. Hosts of subjects, hosts of different theories about all of them; no general ideas. … Doctors have to specialise when they are boys and they remain ignorant all their lives.”