Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most “weight,” though Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more “penetration,” divested his large heavy face of all expression, and looked at his wineglass while Lydgate was speaking. Whatever was not problematical and suspected about this young man⁠—for example, a certain showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders⁠—was positively unwelcome to a physician whose standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on Meningitis, of which at least one copy marked “own” was bound in calf. For my part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.