Miller.
Dr. Price stepped into the hall and met Miller face to face.
He had meant to state the situation to Miller frankly, but now that the
moment had come he wavered. He was a fine physician, but he shrank from
strenuous responsibilities. It had been easy to theorize about the
negro; it was more difficult to look this man in the eyes--whom at this
moment he felt to be as essentially a gentleman as himself--and tell him
the humiliating truth.
As a physician his method was to ease pain--he would rather take the
risk of losing a patient from the use of an anaesthetic than from the
shock of an operation. He liked Miller, wished him well, and would not
wittingly wound his feelings. He really thought him too much of a
gentleman for the town, in view of the restrictions with which he must
inevitably be hampered. There was something melancholy, to a cultivated
mind, about a sensitive, educated man who happened to be off color. Such
a person was a sort of social misfit, an odd quantity, educated out of
his own class, with no possible hope of entrance into that above it. He
felt quite sure that if he had been in Miller's place, he would never
have settled in the South--he would have moved to Europe, or to the West
Indies, or some Central or South American state where questions of color
were not regarded as vitally important.
Dr. Price did not like to lie, even to a negro. To a man of his own
caste, his word was his bond. If it were painful to lie, it would be
humiliating to be found out.
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