The Romance of a Plain ManGlasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson
General
The Romance of a Plain Man
Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson
Businessmen -- Fiction; Love stories; Married people -- Fiction; Railroads -- Fiction; Richmond (Va.) -- Fiction
A single lock of hair, growing just above the bald spot on his head,
stirred in the soft wind like a tuft of bleached grass, while his lower,
slightly protruding lip pursed itself into an angry and childish
expression. He was paying the inevitable price, I gathered, for his
career as "a gay old bird"; but even in the rebuking glance which Dr.
Theophilus now bent upon him, I read the recognition that the president
of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad must be dosed more
sparingly than other men. Under his loose, puffy chin he wore a loose,
puffy tie of a magenta shade, in the midst of which a single black pearl
reposed; and when he turned his head, the creases in his neck looked
like white cords sunk deep in the scarlet flesh.
"There's no use, Theophilus, I can't stand it," he protested. "Delilah,
bring me a sip of whiskey to put a taste in my mouth."
"No whiskey, Delilah, not a drop," commanded the doctor sternly. "It's
the result of your own imprudence, George, and you've got to pay for it.
You've been eating strawberries, and I told you not to touch one with a
ten-foot pole."
"You didn't say a word about strawberry shortcake," rejoined the
General, like a guilty child, "and this attack is due to an entirely
different cause. I dined at the Blands' on Sunday, and Miss Mitty gave
me mint sauce on my lamb. I never could abide mint sauce."
Taking out his prescription book the doctor wrote down a prescription in
a single word, which looked ominously like "calomel" from a distance.
"How did Miss Matoaca seem?" he asked, while Robin, the old pointer,
came and sniffed at my ankles, and I thought of Samuel, sleeping under a
flower bed in the doctor's garden. "She has a touch of malaria, and I
ordered her three grains of quinine every morning."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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