The environment is a familiar one to Williams readers: a Depression-era economically marginal immigrant urban neighborhood. Of particular interest in this story are the narrator's stand against his medical colleagues, whose unsympathetic cynicism the story compares unfavorably to the narrator's arguable naiveté. Other familiar themes are Williams's love of straight-talking and his fascination with women, in this case combined in the adolescent daughter, whose physique the narrator observes in quasi-sexual ways that make some readers uncomfortable.

Whatever his thoughts, the narrator's actions bring only good. (As in Williams's "The Use of Force," the narrator's confession to us makes the story much more interesting than what an observer of the story's exterior action might see.) The baby gets better, at least superficially, the girl's complexion improves. And she goes back to school. "I had tuh," she explains to the narrator who is in love with her toughness, in the story's last words.