"Did they--Are you--Are you all right?" she faltered. "I couldn't bear
it if--"
I laughed and gave her a good hug. "I'm all right," I told her. "They
didn't have time to examine me but gave me two bits of advice. First,
I was to get Jerry Rutherford to handle my case. I guess you need
political influence now to get yourself locked up. And then, I was told
that I ought to have more licker and wimmin in my life. It seems I'm
getting in a rut."
"Winnie!"
"Uh-huh! They recommended it for curing highly inhibited cases like
mine. I'm repressed or something."
"It must be something," Germaine observed fifteen minutes later. "Oh,
dear, I didn't even think whether the door was locked. I'm a sight. You
don't act repressed to me."
She turned her face towards me, her eyes laughing.
"In any case, I'll have to see a doctor," I said, "and it might as
well be Rutherford. He knows so much about me that I won't have to do a
lot of explaining."
"Winnie!"
Germaine swung her feet to the floor and straightened her clothes.
"Winnie," she repeated, "_must_ you go to a doctor? Can't we try the
_other_ prescription--I mean, give it a _good_ try?"
I shook my head.
"No can do. I've got to get my memory straightened out. You and
I--well, _we're_ all right now. But there's my business and then
there's the Secret Service. I _can't_ seem to remember a thing before
the second of April and I did so much lying in Washington, trying to
cover up, that I may get into real trouble. That's what Virginia said,
that I'd lied myself into a worse mess than I'd lied myself out of."
My wife pouted. "Don't these treatments take a long time?" she asked.
"I remember when they sent Cousin Frederick to the asylum after
that time when he put tear-gas in the air-conditioners in the Stock
Exchange, it was three years before they let him out. Of course he
_was_ crazy, though we pretended it was only drink. That time he tried
to tattoo the little Masters girl--But won't they keep you locked up
and do things to you?"
"Hanged if I know," I said, "but they can't keep me there a day longer
than you or I want. It isn't as though I was being committed to an
asylum. It's just that there's a bad crack in my memory. They'll try to
find out what's wrong and patch it up. Perhaps I won't have to stay
after all."
"Do they let wives come and visit their husbands?" she asked dreamily.
"I mean--"
"I've never heard that the medical profession encouraged that kind of
therapy," I told her.
"Speaking of insanity," I continued, "Ponto, you will be glad to know,
is back to normal."
She got up and made a face at me. "Of course," she remarked with
deliberate provocation, "If you think more of Ponto than you do of me.
I'm so glad, Winnie, to know that Ponto is better. He's your dog, isn't
he? What was wrong with him? What medicine did you give him? What did
the vet say--"
She ended in a startled squeak and ran for the door.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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