Unlike Nathan whose disfigurement had given him a morbid appetite for abuse—turned either against himself or against those who he imagined laughed at him—Dr. McAllister had taken his much greater deformity almost as a gift of Providence, for, forced by the needs of his body into frequent hours of leisure, he had had the time to read extensively. But the leisure was work and if he relaxed his sickened muscles, he allowed his mind no rest. He slept no more than four hours, originally for the sake of discipline and later because his strict self-denial produced in him a habitual insomnia. He had told me, when I came to the hospital at five in the morning, that he had only just been preparing for bed when he was summoned to the operating room at four o’clock. The evening, he said, he had spent in studying a Russian grammar, suggested to him by the inconsequential babblings of my mother.