Washington Square

e flourished and practised in the city of New York a physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional share of the cons

d in honour, and more successfully than elsewhere

your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has a

dation; and it is touched by the light of science--a merit appreciated in a community in

very evenly balanced; he was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet the

atters rather more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far (like some practitioners

offering any explanation at all; and he did not belong to

ever man; and this is really the reason w

rned with him, he was some fifty years of

ociety of New York for a man of the world--whi

ossible misconception, that he w

; and, putting aside the great good-nature of the circle in which he practised, which was rather fond of boasting that it poss

and (as the popular voice said) came so easily, that he never aimed at mere effe

voured him, and that he had found the pa

charming girl, Miss Catherine Harrington, of New York, who

etty girls of the small but promising capital which clustered about the Battery and overlooked t

e anomaly of his having been chosen among a dozen suitors by a young woman of high fashion,

t five years a source of extreme satisfaction to the young

d he cultivated his profession with as definite a purpose as if he still had no other resources than his

ly to make money- -it had been rather

ly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of hi

cious, and it was so patent a truth that if he were not a doctor there was nothing el

ion to the "best people" brought him a good many of those patients whose symptoms are, if not mo

d in the course of twenty

forms which, whatever might have been their i

icted to easy enthusiasms, firmly believed, died at three years of age, in spite of ev

ch rendered the poor child, to the Doctor's sense, an inadequate substitute for h

disappointment; but

, had been doing well, suddenly betrayed alarming symptoms, an

own family; and a bright doctor who within three years loses his wife and his litt

owever, escap

but his own, which was much the

s days, and bore for ever the scars of a castigation to which the stronges

ed him too much to be ironical; his misfortune made him

forms of disease, and that, after all, Dr. Sloper had lost other patients

he proposed to himself to make the best of her. He had on hand a stock of u

poor mother, and even in her most diminutive babyho

er, as he looked at her, often said to himself that, such

o tell the truth--But this is a tru