“Last thing I should dream of doing. Only it comes a bit hard on me, after booking you solely for that date.”
It being obviously useless to appeal for sympathy, Eliphalet fell back on his second line of defence.
“But, don’t you see, the entire dignity of the part would be gone if he were played with a cold.”
“No, I don’t,” declared Mr. Dyson. “What’s to prevent the Reverend Coles, or old Hamlet himself, for that matter, from blowing his nose like any other mortal? Now, you take my advice—lie in snug all day, and have some rum and milk, and a couple of boiled onions for lunch.”
“I am a teetotaler, Mr. Dyson, and also a rigid abstainer from onions, not so much from personal distaste as from the knowledge that he whose breath is impregnated with the aroma of that vegetable loses both friends and prestige.”
Suddenly Mr. Dyson’s face brightened.
“By Jove,” he exclaimed, “I saw a guaranteed cure in yesterday’s Herald. Tip-top thing. Breaks the back of the worst cold in four hours. No humbug! There are photos of people who’ve benefited by it—in the Ad.” His lynx eye lighted on a copy of the journal in question at the moment Eliphalet was drawing it into concealment beneath the quilt. “Hi! you’ve got it there—half a minute—now, listen.” And, shaking out the folds of the crumpled news-sheet, he began to read.
“Mrs. Baxter’s testimony on Enoch’s Instantaneous Cold Cure.”
There followed a letter in which the good lady set forth, with great lack of reserve, the painful and familiar symptoms of her malady, stating how, after a night of darkness, an angel from Heaven (disguised as a next-door neighbour) appeared, and urged her to try Enoch’s Instantaneous Cold Cure. Whereon she, despaired of by the luminaries of the faculty, secured a phial of the magic decoction, which not only dissipated the cold, but actually relieved her of an almost chronic dyspepsia and a lifelong tendency to sciatic rheumatism.
“What do you think of that?” demanded Mr. Dyson, in conclusion.