“Of course I do! I collect strangers. What you never seem to realise, my otherwise admirable Cynthia, is that I am profoundly interested in the human animal. I like to observe his little squirmings and watch his reactions to all the ordinary, and still more to the extraordinary things of life. And the more strangers I meet, the more I recognise what a lot there is still to learn.”
“I’m glad I’m not a psychologist,” Cynthia returned. “It must be awfully uphill work.”
“All women are psychologists,” retorted her husband sententiously. “They may not know it, but applied psychology is part of their stock-in-trade.”
“Humph!” Cynthia did not encourage her husband to air his views upon women, about whom she considered he knew less than nothing. She allowed him to call himself a psychologist because she was a kind and tactful girl, but her own word for him so far as her sex was concerned would have been idealist; and she had enough sex-loyalty not to wish to shatter his illusions. “Well,” she went on, changing the subject brightly, “hold the magnifying glass over Mr. Doyle as much as you like, but I’ll just give you one word of advice before it’s too late; beware of Laura, and beware of Dora, but above all, beware of Laura and Dora!”
“And now,” said Guy, throwing the end of his cigarette carefully out of the window, “explain that somewhat cryptic remark.”
“Well, you know Dora, don’t you?”
“Fairly well, I thought. She’s stayed with us—what was it?—three times during the last two years.”
“Well, you know how demure and soulful she always looks, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, when all the time it would disappear just as fast as you could put it in with a shovel?”
“I know that Dora’s appearance is a little deceptive, yes,” gravely agreed Guy, who knew all about his wife’s ideas regarding his own views on her sex but would not have let her guess so for the world.
“Dora, if she wants to, can be a little demon,” amplified Cynthia frankly. “Well, Laura is a worse edition of Dora, that’s all. Apart, they’re demons, but together they’re positively diabolical. I warn you.”