"It's odd how illness makes a chap take to trash in literature," he said to Sophy, whose eyes he saw wondering over the title of the book he had put down when she came in. "It's as if the mind got weak, too, and needed slops like the body."
But this odd deterioration in taste was due to the morphia, which at times gave such a deliciously false sense of interest in the most trivial things. Deep, serious thinking was impossible under its disintegrating glamour. It gave rather gay, fleeting fantasies—a sense of delicate mental power as though thought were a sort of glittering toy, to amuse oneself with. After Wilkie Collins he took up the French detective novels—then shifted to "Ouida." These works filled him with glee. "Crewel-work Ruskin," he called them. "But damned amusing for all that. She dips her coat-of-many-colours in her brother's blood every now and then. She might have been great," he declared, "if she hadn't had hæmorrhages of the imagination. That made her mind anæmic—but she could spin darned good yarns, by Jove!"
He was much amused by his mother's sudden interest in Bobby.
"The Mater's vaulting ambition has gone clean over my head and landed on Bobkins," he told Sophy, chuckling. "I bet she'll live to ninety-and-nine, just for the pleasure of speaking of 'my grandson, the Prime Minister.'"
He took to calling Bobby "Little William Pitt."
"Come here, little William Pitt; you're going to be It, as they say in the States," he would say when the child was brought in to see him. "I hope you'll approve of me for a father when you're in office."
This strange name by which his father called him confused the child and displeased him. He felt that he was being made fun of. Children and dogs dislike the people who laugh at them. He hated to go into his father's room, and resisted so strenuously that Sophy took him there less and less.
As the days went by, and still Anne Harding had not found any morphia or hypodermic syringe in Cecil's possession, Sophy began to grow more hopeful. Cecil was certainly far quieter than he had been for some time. She began again to think that Bellamy and the nurse must surely be mistaken.
On the afternoon of the fourth day she called Anne into her room, and spoke to her about it.
"Don't you think you must be mistaken, this time, Nurse?" she asked eagerly.