“Yes.”
“Anything serious?”
“Nothing; only hysteria; the woman’s a tangle of nerves, a mass of emotions. I have grown to learn her idiosyncrasies in a year. One month it is palpitation—and imaginary heart disease, next month she is swearing that she has cancer of the œsophagus and cannot swallow. The lady has headaches regularly every other week, and merges on melancholia in the intervals.”
Murchison nodded.
“What is the present phase?” he asked.
“Acute migraine and facial neuralgia. She is worrying about her eyes, seems to see nothing—and everything, mere hysterical phantasmagoria. The woman is not to be taken seriously. She is being drenched with bromide and fed upon phenacetin. Come and see her.”
Parker Steel led the way from the library as though he regarded the consultation as a mere troublesome formality, a pandering to domestic officiousness that had to be appeased. Miss Julia Pennington was lying on a sofa in the drawing-room with a younger sister holding her hand. The room smelled horribly of vinegar, and the blinds were down, for the patient persisted that she could not bear the light.
The younger lady rose and bowed to Murchison, and drew aside, with her eyes fixed upon her sister’s face. Miss Julia was moaning and whimpering on the sofa, a thin and neurotic spinster of forty with tightly drawn hair, sharp features, and the peevish expression of a creature who had long been the slave of a hundred imaginary ills.
Murchison sat down beside her, and asked whether she could bear the light. His manner was in acute contrast to Parker Steel’s; the one incisive, almost brusque in his effort to impress; the other calm, quiet, deliberate, sympathetic in every word and gesture.
The younger Miss Pennington drew up the blinds. Murchison was questioning her sister, watching her face keenly, while Parker Steel fidgeted to and fro before the fire.