‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Mrs Weldon, meekly. She began to wipe her eyes, daubing the linen with red and black streaks from her make-up. Then she blew her nose and sat up.
‘I’m sorry,’ she began, forlornly.
‘That’s all right,’ said Harriet, again. ‘I’m afraid you’ve had rather a shock. Perhaps you’d like to bathe your eyes a bit. It’ll make you feel better, don’t you think?’
She supplied a sponge and towel. Mrs Weldon removed the grotesque traces of her grief and made her appearance from within the folds of the towel as a sallow-faced woman of between fifty and sixty, infinitely more dignified in her natural complexion. She made an instinctive movement towards her handbag, and then abandoned it.
‘I look awful,’ she said, with a dreary little laugh, ‘but—what’s it matter, now?’
‘I shouldn’t mind about it,’ said Harriet. ‘You look quite nice. Really and truly. Come and sit down. Have a cigarette. And let me give you a phenacetin or something. I expect you’ve got a bit of a headache.’
--Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase (1932), Chapter V. “The Evidence of the Betrothed.”
Phenacetin was the first synthetic pharmaceutical drug, and one of the first painkillers not derived from opium. It initially appeared on the market in 1887 and was withdrawn from use in 1983 due to its carcinogenic effects. (x)
Image: Bottle of phenacetin and caffeine tablets by Parke Davis from Savory and Moore, made in England 1930-1950. (x)
