Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 109 June to November 1904 . to make them hate someone else enough more, to make up thesum total of the venom at their disposal. Paregoric! Paregoric! was the wordthat was tossed from mouth to mouth,over the coffee-cups, interspersed withsuch interjections as The hard-heartedhussy! the jade! the Jezebel! The oldladies were hardly reasonable, or stoppedto look up the meaning of the languagethey used. Madame, dredging about in her memoryfor parallel instances, called to mind awoman whom she had known who hadbeen a paregoric drunkard. She drank apint a day. Fro
Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 109 June to November 1904 . to make them hate someone else enough more, to make up thesum total of the venom at their disposal. Paregoric! Paregoric! was the wordthat was tossed from mouth to mouth,over the coffee-cups, interspersed withsuch interjections as The hard-heartedhussy! the jade! the Jezebel! The oldladies were hardly reasonable, or stoppedto look up the meaning of the languagethey used. Madame, dredging about in her memoryfor parallel instances, called to mind awoman whom she had known who hadbeen a paregoric drunkard. She drank apint a day. From every fold of her gar-ments, meantime, there exuded a mild,all-pervading, half-tangible odor of thedrug. The old ladies had not noticedthis odor about the child, as yet, but itwould not be their fault, now, if they didnot. From that time on, fired by the de-tective instinct that is so strong in all ofus, instead of passing by on the otherside when they met him with his nurse,they passed as near to them as they could,and lingered—and sniffed for INDIGNATION RAN HIGH 406 HARPERS MONTHLY MAGAZINE. Not a trace nor a whiff of it, nor ofany other drug, could they detect; theirscandalous theory was, of necessity, aban-doned. The old lady who was responsiblefor it fell down, with a resounding bang,from the pedestal upon which her astute-ness had placed her. What did greet their nostrils, in placeof the paregoric, was the sweetest odorimaginable, of fresh linen and of daintysoaps and baby-powders—such an odor asevery mother knows when she kisses herbaby, fresh from his bath, right in thenape of his neck, between the down of hishair and the dimples under the frill ofhis gown. If Monsieur le Bebe had beenwhat is called in nursery phraseology asour baby this tale would never havebeen written. As it was, drawn on by the seductivefragrance, there was not a woman in thepension who did not, when she thoughtno one was watching her, stop the nursewith a civil word—civil, if n
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