Stainton produced his card and a franc. He had not long to wait before the double-doors of the consulting room opened and Boussingault cheerily bade him enter.
"The good day, the good day!" Boussingault was as leathery of face and as voluble as he had been on the evening previous. He took both of Jim's hands and shook them. "It is the early bird that you are, hein? Did the dinner of last night not well digest? Sit. We shall see. It is not my specialty; I help for to eat: I do not help for to digest. But what is a specialty that one to it should confine one's self with a friend? Sit."
The room was lined by bookcases full of medical and social works and pamphlets in French, German, and English: Freud's "Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehr," Duclaux's "L'Hygiène Sociale," Solis-Cohen's "Therapeutics of Tuberculosis," Ducleaux, Fournier, Havelock Ellis, Forel, Buret, Neisser, Bloch. There were some portraits, there was a chair that looked as if it could be converted with appalling ease into an operating table, there was a large electric battery and there was a flat-topped desk covered with phials and loose leaves from a memorandum book. Boussingault seated himself, grunting, at his desk, his back to the window, and indicated a chair that faced him.
Stainton took the chair. He was still pale, and the corners of his ample mouth were contracted.
"My digestion is all right," he said. "What bothers me is something else. I dare say it's not—not much. I know that these things may be the merely temporary effect of some slight nervous depression, of physical weariness, or—or a great many minor things. Only, you know, one does like to have a physician's assurance."
Boussingault peered through his bar-bound pince-nez. He began to understand.
"Nervous depression," said he: "one does not benefit that by absinthe before the déjeuner."
"That was my first absinthe in thirty years and the second in my life," he said; "but I dare say I am rather redolent of it, for the fact is I took it on an empty stomach."
The doctor leaned across the desk, his hands clasped on its surface.