“Ma’am,” said the physician in a metallic staccato, “I hev no credentials. What I propose to-night will be my sole credential.”
In the silence before her reply, Sir Charles’ merry monologue, occasionally broken by the grave assent of the butler, could be heard in the next room.
“What do you say you can do?” she asked.
“Ma’am, let me first tell you right now what the Senator’s gotten wrawng with him. In nineteen fourteen, month of September, I could not hev told you; but in nineteen fourteen, month of October, I could: fur your distinguished British physicist and biologist, Henry Upton, then pro-mulgated his eppoch-making discovery. You hev hurd tell of Caryll’s Ganglia?”
“No,” said Lady Repton nervously, and in a quavering voice, “I have not.”
“Ma’am,” said the Imperial authority with perfect composure, “I hev them here.”
He dived into his bag and produced a little card on which was perfectly indicated the back of the human head, only with the skin and hair removed; two lumps on either side of the neck of this diagram bore in large red letters, “Caryll’s Ganglia,” and two white lines leading from them bore in smaller type, “Caryll’s Ducts.”
This card he gravely put into her hands. She looked at it with some disgust: it reminded her of visits to the butchers’ during the impecuniosity of her early married life.
When, as the Son of Empire fondly imagined, his hostess had thoroughly grasped the main lines of cerebral anatomy, he suddenly thrust his hand into the bag again and pulled out a little pamphlet, which, as it is carefully printed at the end of this book and as the reader will most certainly skip it, I shall not inflict upon her in this place.
It was a reproduction, in portable form, of the great lecture delivered in the January of that year at the Royal Institute. It set forth the late Henry Upton’s discovery that Caryll’s Ganglia were the seat of self-restraint and due caution in the Human Brain.