specialist would think that he was mad! He would ask questions about his brothers and sisters. . . and he would want to see Ernst . . . and he would draw all sorts of learned conclusions, would the clever specialist. . . . No, hanged if he would go to a doctor; he would be ashamed to say:
"Doctor, there's something crawling about inside my carcase, like a beastly centipede."
He would be ashamed, absolute ashamed. . . .
Or to say:
"Doctor, a gin-and-bitters upsets me."
"Well, captain," the doctor would say, "then you'd better not take a gin-and-bitters."
What was the use of going to a doctor, or even a specialist? He would not do it, he would not. . . . The best thing was to be abstemious, certainly not take any drinks . . . and then grapple with that damned sensation—come, he wasn't a girl!—and not think about it, just stop thinking about it. . . . He must have a little distraction: he was leading such a lonely life these days. And, in that loneliness, without his wife and children, he began to think, with that incurable sentimentality which lay hidden deep down in him, of the comfort it was to belong to a large family, of the way it cheered you up. . . . Theirs had been a big family: but how it was scattering now! Bertha's little tribe had all broken up. . . . The others Mamma still kept together; and that Sunday evening was a capital
