“Vehicle—water? Why, I never heard of water being called a vehicle! Thought vehicle meant a carriage or trap.”
“In this case the water would be the vehicle, Poynter, and, as I was saying, if you were to take twenty drops of this extract, or rather, compound, you would feel as if a new lease of life were beginning—that everything looked brighter; that nerve and muscle were being strung up; your power of thought greater, and—try a little, my dear sir.”
“No, thankye, doctor; but if you’ve got a drop of brandy in the place and a bottle of soda, you may make it more than twenty drops of that.”
“I have some brandy,” said the doctor, rising, “but no soda-water. I can mix you a little soda and tartaric acid, though, in a glass of water, and it will have all the effect.”
James Poynter showed his great white teeth in a broad grin, threw himself back in the patients’ chair, and unhooking his watch-chain, began to swing round the big seal, pencil-case, and sovereign-purse which hung at the end.
“No, thankye, doctor,” he said. “Let’s have the brandy-and-water, and sugar purissima, as you folks call it now, and you can mix me up a tonic and send it on.”
“Certainly, my dear Poynter, certainly,” said the doctor, going to a closet, and taking out a spirit decanter, tumbler, and sugar, which he placed upon the stained green-baize table-cover, smilingly looking on afterwards with a little bright copper kettle in his hand as his visitor poured out liberally into his glass.
“All right, eh, doctor?” said the young man, looking up in the bland, smooth face, with a good many wrinkles about his right eye.
“I—er—do not understand you.”
“Brandy all right? No pilly-coshy or anything of that sort in it? Fill right up.”