“What’s the Chief Resident like?” he asked casually.

The razor, about to scrape, paused half an inch in front of the cheek. “Sometimes I like him. Sometimes I don’t like him at all,” Silverstone said.

Spurgeon nodded and decided to shut up and let the man shave. Waiting like this could make him late on his first day, he thought. He hung up his robe and stepped out of his undershorts and into the shower, not daring to surrender to lengthy luxury but unable to resist after the long night of midsummer heat that had gathered in the room under the roof.

When he came out, Silverstone was gone.

Spurgeon shaved carefully but swiftly, bent like a tense black question-mark over the single old-fashioned sink; on his first day at a new hospital there were precedents to establish. One of them, he thought, was not to be the last man to arrive at the Chief Resident’s office for morning rounds.

In his room he pushed his way into whites so stiff with starch that they crackled, clean white socks and the shoes he had polished the night before. He had only a few minutes. Breakfast, he thought regretfully, was out. The elevator was slow; it was going to be a long time before he was accustomed to the molasses pace of the ancient car in the face of a fast schedule. The Chief Resident’s office on the second floor was filled with young men in whites, sitting, lounging, standing in proximity, some of them trying to look bored and a few of them succeeding.

The Chief Resident sat behind his desk, reading Surgery. It was Silverstone, he saw with embarrassment. A comedian or a philosopher, he thought, and was angry at himself for the gaucherie that had allowed him to ask a complete stranger’s opinion about the boss he hadn’t met. He let his glance slide over every face in the room. All ofays. Please God, let me not screw up, he said silently, the prayer he had used for years before every exam.

He stood, shifting his weight from one foot to another. Finally the last man arrived, a transferred first-year resident, six minutes late, the first six minutes of his residency.

“What’s your name?” Silverstone asked.

“Potter, Doctor. Stanley Potter.”

Silverstone stared, eyes unblinking. The new men waited for a sign, a revelation, a preview.

“Dr. Potter, you’ve kept us waiting. Now we’re keeping patients and nurses waiting.”

The resident nodded, smiling in embarrassment.

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“This is a clinical and educational duty, not a show put on for your adolescent amusement, to be attended tardily or at random. If you intend to serve on this service, you’ll move and think and act like a surgeon.”

Potter smiled miserably.

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Silverstone looked slowly around the room. “Do you all understand me?”

Several of the new men nodded almost happily and exchanged with one another covert glances of great significance, their question answered.