III

On a certain evening in November, Mrs. Carter, coming in to see her
friend, invited sympathy for a very bad cold.

"Drippin' and runnin' at the nose I've been all day, my dear. Awake all
night I was with it, and 'tain't often that I've one, but when I do it's
somethin' cruel." It seemed to be better this evening, Mrs. Slater
thought, but when she congratulated her friend on this, Mrs. Carter,
shaking her head, remarked that it had left the nose and travelled into
the throat and ears. "Once it's earache, and I'm done," she said.
Horrible pictures she drew of this earache, and it presently became
clear that Mrs. Carter was in perfect terror of a night made sleepless
with pain. Once, it seemed, had Mrs. Carter tried to commit suicide by
hanging herself to a nail in a door, so maddening had the torture been.
Luckily (Mrs. Carter thanked Heaven) the nail had been dragged from the
door by her weight--"not that I was anything very 'eavy, you
understand." Finally, it appeared that only one thing in the world could
be relied upon to stay the fiend.

Mrs. Carter produced from her pocket a bottle of whisky.

Upon that it followed that, since her reformation, Mrs. Carter had come
to loathe the very smell of whisky, and as for the taste of it! But
rather than be driven by flaming agony down the long stony passages of a
sleepless night--anything.

It was here, of course, that Mrs. Slater should have protested, but, in