“Now,” he said at length, running his eye over the words again, “I want to repeat the performance. Try to remember and duplicate your first replies,” he said.
Again we went through what at first had seemed to me to be a solemn farce, but which I began to see was quite important. Sometimes she would repeat the answer exactly as before. At other times a new word would occur to her. Kennedy was keen to note all the differences in the two lists.
One which I recall because the incident made an impression on me had to do with the trio, “Death—life—inevitable.”
“Why that?” he asked casually.
“Haven’t you ever heard the saying, ‘One should let nothing which one can have escape, even if a little wrong is done; no opportunity should be missed; life is so short, death inevitable’?”
There were several others which to Kennedy seemed more important, but long after we had finished I pondered this answer. Was that her philosophy of life? Undoubtedly she would never have remembered the phrase if it had not been so, at least in a measure.
She had begun to show signs of weariness, and Kennedy quickly brought the conversation around to subjects of apparently a general nature, but skillfully contrived so as to lead the way along lines her answers had indicated.
Kennedy had risen to go, still chatting. Almost unintentionally he picked up from a dressing table a bottle of white tablets, without a label, shaking it to emphasize an entirely, and I believe purposely, irrelevant remark.
“By the way,” he said, breaking off naturally, “what is that?”
“Only something Dr. Maudsley had prescribed for me,” she answered quickly.