“The Mobile Chronicle came,” she said promptly. “It’s on the table in your study.”
XIV.
LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE
So I went to a doctor.
“How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?” he asked.
Turning my head sidewise, I answered, “Oh, quite awhile.”
He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and forty. He wore heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon. I liked him immensely.
“Now,” said he, “I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon your circulation.” I think it was “circulation” he said; though it may have been “advertising.”
He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whiskey, and gave me a drink. He began to look more like Napoleon. I began to like him better.
Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with his fingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb connected with an apparatus on a stand that looked like a thermometer. The mercury jumped up and down without seeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two hundred and thirty-seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such number.
“Now,” said he, “you see what alcohol does to the blood-pressure.”