The Thrift is not yet fully operational, but an emergency patient, Frank Harrison, is brought in with a serious burn on his arm. When he returns the next day asking for more morphine, Eleanor realises he has a more serious ailment. He is suffering from a strangulated hernia, but turns violent when she asks to examine him.
Meanwhile Robert provides his daughter with her first private patient, a Miss Peggy Heart, but Eleanor is not amused to discover that she is in fact a music-hall singer whom her father is seeing socially.
When Harrison collapses in the street, Eleanor is at last able to convince him that he urgently needs an operation. She is eager to perform it herself, as she has not previously had any surgical experience (apart from amputating Daniel Bentley's toes), but requires the services of a qualified anaesthetist. Joe Marsham fits that description, and when Eleanor presents her case as an emergency, he agrees to assist, though he has anbitions to be a surgeon himself.
Lady Cora cultivates the Bishop of Stepney as a potential donor for the Thrift, but when he arrives for a visit and discovers a drunken Frank Harrison celebrating his recovery in the stock room, any hope of support from that quarter is quashed.
To cheer him up, Eleanor insists on taking her father to the theatre, where they enjoy Peggy Hearts raucous performance until she suddenly collapses onstage. Eleanor leaps to the rescue, and the entertainer is whisked to the Bramwell home for a diagnosis of an alcohol-induced ulcer.