Dr. Prince proceeded with his interrogatories in the delicate, reassuring gentlemanly manner that had brought him so many patrons who placed a value upon those amenities. Miss Annabel answered frankly and sensibly, indeed, for one of her years. The feud theory of Mrs. Rankin was freely discussed. The daughter also believed in it.
Soon the physician departed, promising to call again and administer treatment. Then he buzzed down the Avenue and four doors on an asphalted side street to the office of Dr. Grumbleton Myers, the great specialist in locomotor ataxia and nerve ailments. The two distinguished physicians shut themselves in a private office, and the great Myers dragged forth a decanter of sherry and a box of Havanas. When the consultation was over both shook their heads.
“Fact is,” summed up Myers, “we don’t know anything about anything. I’d say treat symptoms now until something turns up; but there are no symptoms.”
“The feud diagnosis, then?” suggested Doctor Prince, archly, ridding his cigar of its ash.
“It’s an interesting case,” said the specialist, noncommittally.
“I say, Prince,” called Myers, as his caller was leaving. “Er—sometimes, you know, children that fight and quarrel are shut in separate rooms. Doesn’t it seem a pity, now, that bloomers aren’t in fashion? By separ—”
“But they aren’t,” smiled Doctor Prince, “and we must be fashionable, at any rate.”
Doctor Prince burned midnight oil—or its equivalent, a patent, electric, soft-shaded, midnight incandescent, over his case. With such little success did his light shine that he was forced to make a little speech to the Rankins full of scientific terms—a thing he conscientiously avoided with his patients—which shows that he was driven to expedient. At last he was reduced to suggest treatment by hypnotism.
Being crowded further, he advised it, and appeared another day with Professor Adami, the most reputable and non-advertising one he could find among that school of practitioners.
Miss Annabel, gentle and melancholy, fell an easy victim—or, I should say, subject—to the professor’s influence. Previously instructed by Doctor Prince in the nature of the malady he was about to combat, the dealer in mental drugs proceeded to offer “suggestion” (in the language of his school) to the afflicted and unconscious young lady, impressing her mind with the conviction that her affliction was moonshine and her perambulatory powers without impairment.