Eating an unphiltred railway lunch and reading Erewhon, Aubrey congratulated himself on the decision. He felt better already; he was going to London for conversations with his publishers and a little final research needed for his third Appendix. By the time the train drew in at Waterloo Station, he was able to admit to himself, quite rationally, that the state of his health perplexed him, and that as he had not renewed the severed link with the Tittingham doctor, he would take this opportunity to consult one of those Harley Street fellows. It would be too absurd to allow oneself to become the prey to some genuine disease just because one’s servants were the prey of superstition.177

The first Harley Street fellow did all that is customary. He took a piece of Aubrey’s flesh for a biopsis and some of his blood for a test, and analysed his sputum and his urine, and asked him if he had disliked his father; he also took a good many of Aubrey’s guineas, and prescribed moderate outdoor exercise. But he did not hit on a diagnosis until he learned that Aubrey had travelled in Asia Minor, at which point he prescribed a specialist in tropical diseases. Aubrey cavilled at this outlook on Asia Minor, but followed the prescription.

The specialist in tropical diseases drew off some more of Aubrey’s blood and injected him with several experimental vaccines, which bore out to perfection a prognosis that they would make Aubrey feel uncomfortable. Even so, the specialist declared himself still unsatisfied, and wanted an exploratory operation to rule out any lingering possibility that he might have overlooked a splenetic aberration. Dejected as a sick cat, Aubrey resentfully began to yield. The specialist spoke of the surgeon he had in mind, a wonderful man, a real artist, and, as pills are sugar-coated, the surgeon was presented as ‘old Bust-Bodice,’ a soubriquet, the specialist explained, based on the initials B. B., though of course with some sly reference to incisions in the thorax. The cat being so nearly in the bag, why not, he suggested, make an appointment immediately? B. B. was only a few doors down the street. It was a door resembling all the other doors, clinically clean and flashing with brass plates. The specialist chose out a bell and pressed it. As he did so, Aubrey, who had been feeling no worse than dully 178afraid, found himself shaking with terror. The name on the plate above the bell was Blair.

The door yawned open. A moment later, the door of a strolling taxi had slammed to and Aubrey was driving off in it. He congratulated himself that he had saved his reason; to be in the hands of anyone called Blair must inevitably compel him to meditate on Jeanie’s ridiculous confidence in her eye, and that way lay madness. His actual sensation was that he had just managed to escape with his life. In either case, he was done with doctors, and for the remainder of that day he was in excellent health.