“Does this Mr Lydgate mean to say there is no use in taking medicine?” said Mrs Mawmsey, who was slightly given to drawling. “I should like him to tell me how I could bear up at Fair time, if I didn’t take strengthening medicine for a month beforehand. Think of what I have to provide for calling customers, my dear!”—here Mrs Mawmsey turned to an intimate female friend who sat by—“a large veal pie—a stuffed fillet—a round of beef—ham, tongue, et cetera, et cetera! But what keeps me up best is the pink mixture, not the brown. I wonder, Mr Mawmsey, with your experience, you could have patience to listen. I should have told him at once that I knew a little better than that.”
“No, no, no,” said Mr Mawmsey; “I was not going to tell him my opinion. Hear everything and judge for yourself is my motto. But he didn’t know who he was talking to. I was not to be turned on his finger. People often pretend to tell me things, when they might as well say, ‘Mawmsey, you're a fool.’ But I smile at it: I humour everybody’s weak place. If physic had done harm to self and family, I should have found it out by this time.”
The next day Mr Gambit was told that Lydgate went about saying physic was of no use.
“Indeed!” said he, lifting his eyebrows with cautious surprise. (He was a stout husky man with a large ring on his fourth finger.) “How will he cure his patients, then?”
“That is what I say,” returned Mrs Mawmsey, who habitually gave weight to her speech by loading her pronouns. “Does he suppose that people will pay him only to come and sit with them and go away again?”
Mrs Mawmsey had had a great deal of sitting from Mr Gambit, including very full accounts of his own habits of body and other affairs; but of course he knew there was no innuendo in her remark, since his spare time and personal narrative had never been charged for. So he replied, humorously—
“Well, Lydgate is a good-looking young fellow, you know.”
“Not one that I would employ,” said Mrs Mawmsey. “Others may do as they please.”
Hence Mr Gambit could go away from the chief grocer’s without fear of rivalry, but not without a sense that Lydgate was one of those hypocrites who try to discredit others by advertising their own honesty, and that it might be worth some people’s while to show him up. Mr Gambit, however, had a satisfactory practice, much pervaded by the smells of retail trading which suggested the reduction of cash payments to a balance. And he did not think it worth his while to show Lydgate up until he knew how. He had not indeed great resources of education, and had had to work his own way against a good deal of professional contempt; but he made none the worse accoucheur for calling the breathing apparatus “longs.”
Other medical men felt themselves more capable. Mr Toller shared the highest practice in the town and belonged to an old
