From her I was passed on to her younger sister, Miss
Elizabeth, a small and withered thing with twitching lips,
victim, she told me, to very much the same sort of throat, but
secretly devoted to another set of medicines. When she went away
with Baxter and the bath-chair, I fell across a major of the
Indian army with gout in his glassy eyes, and a stomach which he
had taken all round the Continent. He laid everything before me;
and him I escaped only to be confided in by a matron with a
tendency to follicular tonsilitis and eczema. Baxter waited hand
and foot on his cousins till five o'clock, trying, as I saw, to
atone for his treatment of the dead sister. Miss Mary ordered him
about like a dog.
"I warned you it would be dull," he said when we met in the
smoking-room.
"It's tremendously interesting," I said. "But how about a look
round the links?"
"Unluckily damp always affects my eldest cousin. I've got to buy
her a new bronchitis-kettle. Arthurs broke her old one
yesterday."
We slipped out to the chemist's shop in the town, and he bought a
large glittering tin thing whose workings he explained.
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