"I've got no catarrh," said Mr. Prohack, with conviction.
"Yes, yes. Catarrh of the stomach. Probably had it for years. The duodenum is obstructed. A little accident that easily happens."
He addressed himself as it were privately to Mrs. Prohack. "The duodenum is no thicker than that." He indicated the pencil with which he was already writing in a pocket-book. "We'll get it right."
"What is the duodenum?" Mr. Prohack wanted to cry out. But he was too ashamed to ask. It was hardly conceivable that he, so wise, so prudent, had allowed over forty years to pass in total ignorance of this important item of his own body. He felt himself to be a bag full of disconcerting and dangerous mysteries. Or he might have expressed it that he had been smoking in criminal nonchalance for nearly half a century on the top of a powder magazine. He was deeply impressed by the rapidity and assurance of the doctor's diagnosis. It was wonderful that the queer fellow could in a few minutes single out an obscure organ no bigger than a pencil and say: "There is the ill." The fellow might be a quack, but sometimes quacks were men of genius. His shame and his alarm quickly vanished under the doctor's reassuring and bland manner. So much so that when Dr. Veiga had written out a prescription, Mr. Prohack said lightly:
"I shall leave that to you. Perhaps if I tell you you'll be lucky if you don't have jaundice...! But I think you _will_ be lucky. I'll try to look in again this afternoon."
These last words staggered both Mr. and Mrs. Prohack.
"I've been expecting this for years. I knew it would come." Mrs. Prohack breathed tragically.
Mrs. Prohack gazed at Dr. Veiga as at a high priest, and waited to be vouchsafed a further message.
"Anyhow, if I find it impossible to call, I'll telephone in any case," said Dr. Veiga.
Mrs. Prohack, like an acolyte, personally attended the high priest as far as the street, listening with acute attention to his recommendations. When she returned she had put on a carefully bright face. Evidently she had decided, or had been told, that cheerfulness was essential to ward off jaundice.
"Now that's what I _call_ a doctor," said she. "To think of your friend Plott...! I've telephoned for a messenger boy to go to the chemist's."