A physician is summoned to make a house-call on a family that he has never met or administered to before. Once he arrives at the home, he makes a series of judgements that enable him to sum up the situation he has been called into. The home is quite poor, but it is clean. The patient is a little girl whose parents are clearly very loving, and who are very worried about her. They are jumpy, depending on the doctor and his knowledge but also very suspicious and untrusting of it. They feel powerless to help their child themselves and are clearly uncomfortable with this. The doctor is immediately taken with the child's strange and powerful beauty, far beyond her years.
The doctor is worried that the cause of the child's illness might be diphtheria. He tries to determine whether or not the little girl has a sore throat, but she will not let him get anywhere near her. She claws at his eyes and things get rapidly worse as he tries to carry out a physical examination of her. The more that battle escalates the more convinced the doctor becomes that his diagnosis will depend on his carrying out a throat examination. He becomes increasingly frustrated and angry, and also gets more forceful in his attempts to see her throat. The parents, meanwhile, are in agonies, worried about her health, mortified by her behavior, and embarrassed that they cannot control their daughter for the duration of the examination.
At this point, the visit ceases to be about any professional evaluation of the little girl. It becomes a battle of wills, and it also becomes something else; the doctor admits falling in love with the little girl, whom he calls a "savage brat". He is the first to point out that this is irrational and wrong but he cannot seem to shake the feeling that has taken him over. The last paragraphs of the story describe a scene less like a throat examination, and disturbingly like a rape.
