Would it be running too great a risk to show the story to the doctor, and try to get a little valuable information in that way? It would be useless. He would make some feeble joke; he would say, girls and poisons are not fit company for each other.
But I might discover what I want to know in another way. I might call on the doctor, after he has gone out on his afternoon round of visits, and might tell the servant I would wait for his master’s return. Nobody would be in my way; I might get at the medical literature in the consulting-room, and find the information for myself.
A knock at my door interrupted me in the midst of my plans. Mrs. Tenbruggen again!—still in a fidgety state of feeling on the subject of my health. “Which is it?” she said. “Pain of body, my dear, or pain of mind? I am anxious about you.”
“My dear Elizabeth, your sympathy is thrown away on me. As I have told you already, I am over-tired—nothing more.”
She was relieved to hear that I had no mental troubles to complain of. “Fatigue,” she remarked, “sets itself right with rest. Did you take a very long walk?”
“Yes.”
“Beyond the limits of the town, of course? Philip has been taking a walk in the country, too. He doesn’t say that he met you.”
These clever people sometimes overreach themselves. How she suggested it to me, I cannot pretend to have discovered. But I did certainly suspect that she had led Philip, while they were together downstairs, into saying to her what he had already said to Miss Jillgall. I was so angry that I tried to pump my excellent friend, as she had been trying to pump me—a vulgar expression, but vulgar writing is such a convenient way of writing sometimes. My first attempt to entrap the Masseuse failed completely. She coolly changed the subject.
“Have I interrupted you in writing?” she asked, pointing to my Diary.
“No; I was idling over what I have written already—an extraordinary story which I copied from a book.”