The Doctor’s eyes shone across the table at him like soft lamps of sound antique wisdom. “Burton’s,” he exclaimed emphatically. “None of friend Renshaw’s stuff! Burton’s! And let it be that old dark mahogany-coloured liquor we drank once under the elm-trees at Ashbourne.”
The waitress regarded him with a coquettish smile. She laboured under the perpetual illusion that every word the Doctor uttered was some elaborate and recondite gallantry directed towards herself.
The conversation ran on in lively spasmodic waywardness. It was not long before the ale appeared, of the very body and colour suggested by the Doctor’s memories. Nance refused to touch it.
“Have some ginger-pop, instead, then,” murmured Fingal, pouring the brown ale into a china jug decorated with painted pansies. “Linda would like some of that, I know.”
The priest held out his glass in the direction of the jug.
“A thousand deep-sea devils—pardon me, Nance, dear!—carry off these pessimists,” went on the Doctor, filling up the clergyman’s glass and his own with ritualistic solemnity while the little maid, the victim of an irrepressible laughing-fit, retired to fetch ginger-beer. “Let us remember how the great Voltaire served God and defended all honest people. Here’s to Voltaire’s memory and a fig for these neurotic scribblers who haven’t the gall to put out their tongues!” He raised his glass to his lips, his eyes shining with humorous enjoyment.
“What scribblers are you talking about?” inquired Nance, peeling a golden apple and glancing at the misty roofs through the window at her side.
“All of these twopenny-halfpenny moderns,” cried the Doctor, “who haven’t the gall in their stomachs to take the world by the scruff of its neck and lash out. A fig for them! Our poor dear Adrian, when he gets cured, will write something—you mark my words—that’ll make ’em stir themselves and sit up!”
“But Adrian is pessimistic too, isn’t he?” said Nance, looking wistfully at the speaker.
“Nonsense!” cried the Doctor. “Adrian has more Attic salt in him than you women guess. I believe, myself, that this book of his will be worthy to be put beside the ‘Thoughts’ of Pascal. Have you ever seen Pascal’s face? He isn’t as good-looking as Adrian but he has the same intellectual fury.”