[BNP/E3, 2721L4 – 17]
“Do you know,” I inquired that trick of Arabian sorcerers:
Abracadabra
Etc.
“I don’t exactly see the joke,” said Mr. Parkins.
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Nabos was rude and liked to be rude; it would worry a psychologist to discover the psychic reason of this desire. It seems strange that any human being should delight in being unpleasant.... He had few patients, because, as he himself said, a man must be too patient to have him for medical assistant.... Yet it may be questioned whether he kept the few he had with his amiable eccentricity of saying to them after examining them, with a solemn and convinced air: The worst that can befall you is to die. These are some trite things that are too trite I will say, after his own manner. Again I remember the unpleasant feeling he gave me once when (I did not yet know him well) he looked at me intently for some seconds and then said in a sure voice: You are either consumptive, or (I felt cold and fearful), or… or… or not. He looked at me amazed, relieved, half-amused, yet half-{…} face without the shadow of a smile. He loved to give – I afterwards found – these kins of fright. But I have not yet said how it was that I met him and what were the circumstances of that meeting.
