基本信息
mchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
three times a day for many months i had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. on the contrary, from day to day i had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that i had lacked the courage to protest. again and again i had registered a vow that i should deliver my soul upon the subject; but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. his great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which i had had of many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.
yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the beaune which i had taken with my lunch or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, i suddenly felt that i could bold out no longer.
"which is it to-day," i asked, "morphine or cocaine?"
he raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.
"it is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. would you care to try it?"
"no, indeed," i answered brusquely. "my constitution has not got over the afghan campaign yet. i cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it."
he smiled at my vehemence. "perhaps you are right, watson," he said. "i suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. i find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment."
"but consider!" i said earnestly. "count the cost! your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. you know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. surely the game is hardly worth the candle. why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? remember that i speak not only as one comrade to another but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable."
he did not seem o
