Emmanuel has created a tea that sweetens the breath, which we are now able to offer our wealthier patients. Sales have boosted clinic revenues by 2 percent alone this month.

Emmanuel is an especial favorite of our child patients and has a light touch with even the most fearful ones.

I counted each time she wrote that name. I knew enough that it was ridiculous to be jealous of a name on paper, but I could not help it, though I dared not mention it to Madeline Grady—or Experience and Louisa.

Mrs. Cookstone is now complaining of a pain in her calf muscle, which she says she also feels in her left shoulder. Emmanuel has already prescribed something that has done wonders, but I’m wondering if you can guess what it was.

This was even worse, to be set against a rival I could not even see, in a race I was no longer particularly interested in but, because of pride, I could not abandon. She wrote of Emmanuel with the voice of a proud mother. She praised him in a way she had never praised me—except for that one time, so long ago, when Mr. Ben first came to us and she had stroked my cheek and said, “Libertie is beautiful.”

But she had never called me clever, or smart, or good with patients, or even particularly hardworking.

Now when she sent me problems to solve, she would write, Emmanuel has already found the answer, but I wonder if you can.

She did not send me cutouts from journals anymore, because Emmanuel has asked to study them and add to his own collection. She would send them to me when he was done.

Can you feel brotherly jealousy for a man you have never met? A figment of your imagination, a ghost of your mother’s convictions? I did. I could not even store her letters in my chest, beside my list of grades—I felt that somehow the letters would whisper to one another, and my mother would instinctively know, back home in Brooklyn, how close I was to failing.

I spent that spring more in the music room than the library again, until, as the days began to lengthen, Louisa and Experience fell into a bitter disagreement.

A dean had suggested to the two of them that perhaps they should sing spirituals, that they should add these songs to their repertoire and then make a show of performing them.