Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/76

 chop dialectics with your doctor. He knows everything about your way of life; your past, your future, and your present state, and he can pepper you with phrases that seem as harmless as the alphabet, if you look at them from the point of view of a physician. Yet if the world chooses to place its own construction on them, it would not feel tempted to mistake one for an archangel. In short, your doctor is not the person you should lead into a discourse in the presence of your Aunt.

"Then I must keep my bed for at least a week?" says I.

"I should strongly advise it," says old Paradise.

"Indeed you would, sir," says I, sweetly; "then, Emblem, fetch me my spotted taffety. For I propose to instantly get up."

And to the indignation of my Aunt, the dowager, who regarded the whole tribe of doctors as religiously as the Brahmins do their sacred bull, I suddenly renounced the sheets, sat on the margin of the bed, and bade Emblem draw my stockings on. In my experience this hath proved the exactest mode of routing the whole infernal faculty. Do not argue with them, for their whole art consists in contriving new and elegant diseases for persons of an uncompromising health. Therefore at this moment my Aunt, with a shake of her wintry curls at me, invited the doctor to a dish of tea downstairs, and a game of cribbage afterwards. Thus before my second stocking was drawn on they had de