"THE SONG OF THE LARK" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little
operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting-
room was carpeted and stiffly furnished, something like a
country parlor. The study had worn, unpainted floors, but
there was a look of winter comfort about it. The doctor's
flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in
orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide
bookcase, with double glass doors, reached from the floor
to the ceiling. It was filled with medical books of every
thickness and color. On the top shelf stood a long row of
thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark mottled
board covers, with imitation leather backs.

As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially
old, so the doctor in small Colorado towns twenty-five
years ago was generally young. Dr. Archie was barely
thirty. He was tall, with massive shoulders which he held
stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was a distin-
guished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.

There was something individual in the way in which his
reddish-brown hair, parted cleanly at the side, bushed over
his high forehead. His nose was straight and thick, and his

eyes were intelligent. He wore a curly, reddish mustache
and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him look a little
like the pictures of Napoleon III. His hands were large and
well kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backs were shaded
with crinkly reddish hair. He wore a blue suit of woolly,
wide-waled serge; the traveling men had known at a glance
that it was made by a Denver tailor. The doctor was al-
ways well dressed.

Dr. Archie turned up the student's lamp and sat down in
the swivel chair before his desk. He sat uneasily, beating
a tattoo on his knees with his fingers, and looked about him
as if he were bored. He glanced at his watch, then absently
took from his pocket a bunch of small keys, selected one
and looked at it. A contemptuous smile, barely percepti-
ble, played on his lips, but his eyes remained meditative.
Behind the door that led into the hall, under his buffalo-
skin driving-coat, was a locked cupboard. This the doctor
opened mechanically, kicking aside a pile of muddy over-
shoes. Inside, on the shelves, were whiskey glasses and
decanters, lemons, sugar, and bitters. Hearing a step in
the empty, echoing hall without, the doctor closed the cup-
board again, snapping the Yale lock. The door of the
waiting-room opened, a man entered and came on into
the consulting-room.