What a magnificent clientele he had, this Jenkins!  Nothing but princely mansions, heated staircases, laden with flowers at every landing, upholstered and silky alcoves, where disease was transformed into something discreet, elegant, where nothing suggested that brutal hand which throws on a bed of pain those who only cease to work in order to die.  They were not in any true speech, sick people, these clients of the Irish doctor.  They would have been refused admission to a hospital.  Their organs not possessing even strength to give them a shock, the seat of their malady was to be discovered nowhere, and the doctor, as he bent over them, might have sought in vain the throb of any suffering in those bodies which the inertia, the silence of death already inhabited.  They were worn-out, debilitated people, anaemics, exhausted by an absurd life, but who found it so good still that they fought to have it prolonged.  And the Jenkins pills became famous precisely by reason of that lash of the whip which they gave to jaded existences.

“Doctor, I beseech you, let me be fit to go to the ball this evening!” the young woman would say, prostrate on her lounge, and whose voice was reduced to a breath.

“You shall go, my dear child.”

And she went; and never had she looked more beautiful.

“Doctor, at all costs, though it should kill me, to-morrow morning I must be at the Cabinet Council.”

He was there, and carried away from it in a triumph of eloquence and of ambitious diplomacy.

Afterward—­oh, afterward, if you please!  But no matter!  To their last day Jenkins’s clients went about, showed themselves, cheated the devouring egotism of the crowd.  They died on their feet, as became men and women of the world.

After a thousand peregrinations in the Chaussee d’Antin and the Champs-Elysees, after having visited every millionaire or titled personage in the Faubourg Saint Honore, the fashionable doctor arrived at the corner of the Cours-la-Reine and the Rue Francois I., before a house with a rounded front, which occupied the angle on the quay, and entered an apartment on the ground floor which resembled in nowise those through which he had been passing since morning.  From the threshold, tapestries covering the wall, windows of old stained glass with strips of lead cutting across a discrete and composite light, a gigantic saint in carved wood which fronted a Japanese monster with protruding eyes and a back covered with delicate scales like tiles, indicated the imaginative and curious taste of an artist.  The little page who answered the door held in leash an Arab greyhound larger than himself.

“Mme. Constance is at mass,” he said, “and Mademoiselle is in the studio quite alone.  We have been at work since six o’clock this morning,” added the child with a rueful yawn which the dog caught on the wing, making him open wide his pink mouth with its sharp teeth.