She nodded.
"You are clever," she answered. "I don't know what you'll make of it—it sounds so silly." She looked up at him, rubbing the back of one hand against the palm of the other. "It's—it's a panther; just a beautiful black panther; a splendid, lithe, graceful, dangerous wild animal." Even little Evie was susceptible at times to embarrassment, and at this moment she could not endure the piercing stare of those black eyes. She dropped her eyes modestly and murmured, "Oh, Mr. Lisburn, do you think you can help me?"
"I'm sure I can," he answered; "at least, I can if I may be perfectly candid."
Evie said that was all she asked—candor.
"In that case—" said he. He walked to the door and leaned against it as if the revelations he was about to make were such that she might try to escape before she heard him out. "In that case," he repeated, in that smooth, almost honeyed tone in which the psychoanalyst clothes even the most shocking statements, "let me say that you are the most phenomenal little liar, little Evie, that I have ever met—yes, among all the many I have known I gladly hand you the palm."
"Mr. Lisburn!" said Evie, but she was so much surprised and interested that she did not do justice to her protest.
"What makes me angry," he went on in his civil tone, "is that you should imagine you could get away with it. However much of an ass you may consider me, you ought to have known that there was enough in the science of psychoanalysis to show from the very beginning that you were a fraud."
"Not from the beginning!" said Evie.
"From the first evening. You haven't one single symptom of a person with a neurosis—not one. If you knew a little bit more—pooh, if you knew anything at all about the subject—"