Jack Troy got back in the car with a lighter step. Medicine was not nothing, from the anguish of spiritual meaninglessness there was reprieve in aiding another, though there remained the mystery why caring for the sick was easier than for the well, and for the stranger than your own blood. They were mysteries he couldn’t solve, and under the grace of Nora Haugh’s good humour and sweet loaf he could let them be, sitting behind the steering wheel and not for the first or last time recalling his father’s adage that the central challenge of life was to accept that the world is a place of pain, And
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