He watched her up the stairs and then turned and walked to the fire,
with his hands in his pockets and his head down.
I closed the news stand and he came over just as I was hanging up the
cigar-case key for Amanda King in the morning. He reached up and took
the key off its nail.
"I'll keep that," he said. "It's no tobacco after this, Minnie."
"You can't keep them here, then," I retorted. "They've got to smoke;
it's the only work they do."
"We'll see," he said quietly. "And--oh, yes, Minnie, now that we shall
not be using the mineral spring--"
"Not use the mineral spring!" I repeated, stupefied.
"Certainly NOT!" he said. "This is a drugless sanatorium, Minnie, from
now on. That's part of the theory--no drugs."
"Well, I'll tell you one thing," I snapped, "theory or no theory, you've
got to have drugs. No theory that I ever heard of is going to cure Mr.
Moody's indigestion and Miss Cobb's neuralgia."
"They won't have indigestion and neuralgia."
"Or Amanda King's toothache."
"We won't have Amanda King."
He put his elbow on the stand and smiled at me.
"Listen, Minnie," he said. "If you hadn't been wasting your abilities in
the mineral spring, I'd be sorry to close it. But there will be plenty
for you to do. Don't you know that the day of the medicine-closet in the
bath-room and the department-store patent-remedy counter is over? We've
got sanatoriums now instead of family doctors. In other words, we put in
good sanitation systems and don't need the plumber and his repair kit.
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