City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
He actually meant it. He was like a boy with a new game. His sense of
the dreariness of London had disappeared. He knew what it would be like
with Miss Alicia as a companion. He had really seen nothing of the place
himself, and he would find out every darned thing worth looking at, and
take her to see it--theaters, shops, every show in town. When they left
the breakfast-table it was agreed upon that they would make the journey
the following day.
He did not openly refer to the fact that among the plans for their round
of festivities he had laid out for himself the attending to one or
two practical points. He was going to see Palford, and he had made an
appointment with a celebrated nerve specialist. He did not discuss this
for several reasons. One of them was that his summing up of Miss Alicia
was that she had had trouble enough to think over all her little life,
and the thing for a fellow to do for her, if he liked her, was to
give her a good time and make her feel as if she was at a picnic right
straight along--not let her even hear of a darned thing that might worry
her. He had said comparatively little to her about Strangeways. His
first mention of his condition had obviously made her somewhat nervous,
though she had been full of kindly interest. She was in private not
sorry that it was felt better that she should not disturb the patient
by a visit to his room. The abnormality of his condition seemed just
slightly alarming to her.
“But, oh, how good, how charitable, you are!” she had murmured.
“Good,” he answered, the devout admiration of her tone rather puzzling
him. “It ain't that. I just want to see the thing through. I dropped
into it by accident, and then I dropped into this by accident, and that
made it as easy as falling off a log. I believe he's going to get well
sometime. I guess I kind of like him because he holds on to me so and
believes I'm just It. Maybe it's because I'm stuck on myself.”
His visit to Strangeways was longer than usual that afternoon. He
explained the situation to him so that he understood it sufficiently not
to seem alarmed by it. This was one of the advances Tembarom had noticed
recently, that he was less easily terrified, and seemed occasionally
to see facts in their proper relation to one another. Sometimes the
experiments tried on him were successful, sometimes they were not, but
he never resented them.
“You are trying to help me to remember,” he said once. “I think you will
sometime.”
“Sure I will,” said Tembarom. “You're better every day.”
Pearson was to remain in charge of him until toward the end of the
London visit. Then he was to run up for a couple of days, leaving in his
place a young footman to whom the invalid had become accustomed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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