The physician is freed from his own “face of stone.”[2][3] Betty and Fred Miller, editors for Blast, a magazine featuring proletarian short stories, published a number of Williams’s works in 1933-1934 in the five issues of the short-lived journal.
The harassed and exhausted doctor, presented at first as a “rude misanthrope,” treats the poor immigrant Jewish family who visit his office with disdain, rationalizing his anti-semitism with vulgar stereotyping.
[10] Williams presents the reader with an uncharacteristically “harsh and offensive” health professional, at odds with “the romantic vision of the healer-physician.”[11] Another literary device appears when the doctor provides the 24-year-old wife, suffering from severe varicose veins, with “pills” to treat her condition.
Gish writes: “The physician's recognition of the humanity he is seeing, manifested most clearly in the love of the husband for his wife, and, in turn, the love of the mother for her child —is by implication the pill the doctor must swallow, if he is to remain honest and faithful to his calling.”[12] Literary critic Nasrullah Mambrol writes: “Because the doctor narrates the tale, the reader follows his process of discovery, so when he stops stereotyping the couple, the reader does so too.
Williams once again successfully uses dialogue to convey character interaction.”[13] Gish provides this thematic summary: The title takes one level of meaning from the poker-face wife, never smiling, never speaking - until the very end.