Lucky Mr. Ponders to have for his own a cosy room
like that—men, always for some reason,
with the best of everything again! Unpleasing
Mr. Ponders to look at you like that and to speak to
you like that—men, always horrible again!
Rosalie, thus thinking, made a swift and unobserved
climb to the attics. Miss Keggs must have heard
her coming. The door was pulled sharply from Rosalie’s
hand and there was Miss Keggs and the bottle almost
snatched away from Rosalie. “How long you’ve
been! But you’ve got it! And no one
saw you?” Miss Keggs went very swiftly to the
washstand and took up a small tumbler. Clear
that she wanted her medicine very badly. She
toppled in the contents of the bottle, its neck clinking
against the glass, the dark red medicine splashing
and some spilling, so differently from Mr. Ponders’s
performance of a far more difficult operation, and
with the bottle still in her hand held the glass to
her lips and drank deeply.
Yet there was a funny thing about the draught.
It seemed to Rosalie that Miss Keggs with that eager
draught yet did not swallow at once but only filled
her mouth to its capacity. She then swallowed
very slowly and with movements of her cheeks as though
she was sucking down the medicine and tasting it in
every portion of her mouth. Colour came into
her cheeks. The medicine certainly appeared to
do her immense good.
Miss Keggs’s friendliness towards Rosalie was
settled and established from that night. Thereafter
it became a very regular thing for Rosalie to visit
the room of Miss Keggs of an evening; and at intervals,
sometimes twice a week, sometimes not three times
in a month, to descend to the den of Mr. Ponders for
the dark-red medicine which did Miss Keggs so much
good and which she always took in that peculiar sucking
way from a full mouth, one would be so long sometimes
in swallowing a mouthful, beginning a sentence and
then drinking and then all that time in swallowing
before she completed the sentence, that she several
times, by way of apology, ex-plained the reason to
Rosalie. “I have to swallow it very slowly
like that,” explained Miss Keggs, “because
that’s the way for it to do me good. It’s
my doctor’s orders.”
“It seems a business,” was Rosalie’s
comment.
“Yes, it is a business,” Miss Keggs agreed.
Rosalie added, “How very lucky it is, Miss Keggs,
that Mr. Ponders keeps your medicine.”
“Yes, it’s certainly very lucky,”
Miss Keggs agreed.
The effect of her medicine was always to make her
very complaisant.
