“Isn’t he?” Mr. Dodge said, and he laughed hopefully, for it seemed to him that here was an unexpected hint of humour, something he had never attributed to the young man. “What would surprise him as much as that?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Crabbe replied. “But he told me once he always got sick if anything surprised him too much. He says it injures his digestion. What he’s surprised about now, it was when I told him about Lily’s telephoning me this morning you were going to find me a position that would interest me. He certainly said he was surprised.”
Mr. Dodge’s expectations collapsed, though his expression remained indomitably genial. “I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll surprise him more by showing him how well you get on at the work.”
“I know I will,” Crabbe returned, simply. “I mean I’m certain to if it is interesting. It’s just like I’ve been telling Lily: the only reason I ever had any trouble at all in business, it’s because the luck’s been all one way so far;—it kept against my getting anything to do that had any possibilities in it. But it’ll be different from now on, I guess. All anybody needs to do for me, Mr. Dodge, is to find me a position where I’ll feel some use in getting my brain to work.”
Mr. Dodge said he was sure of it, gave his attention to his plate for a few moments, and then, with the gallant assistance of his wife, returned to the weather. Later, when they were alone together in the library, where they could hear from the drawing-room the pretty sound of Lily’s prattling, and, at brief intervals, her happy laughter, the parents faced their misery.
“It’s unbelievable,” Mr. Dodge said, huskily. “You don’t run across these extreme cases of self-satisfied asininity more than a few times in your whole life, even counting all the hundreds and thousands of people you come in contact with. And to think you’ve got to take such a case into your family!”
“It’s your idea!” his wife reminded him.
“It isn’t! It’s not my idea; it’s a monstrous delusion that’s got hold of our girl and that we failed to show her is a delusion. Well, since we couldn’t show her it is, and since opposing her in it was injuring her health, what’s left for us to do but to act as if it were a reality? It isn’t my idea to treat this moron as an angel and take him into our family: it’s the dreadful necessity that her delusion has forced upon us.”
“Thank you for not ending with, ‘Isn’t that logical?’ ” she said. “I’ve been under such a strain, keeping my face cordial at the table, I don’t believe I could have stood it!”
“Under a strain?” he echoed. “I should say so!” He gave her a commiserating and comradelike pat upon her shoulder as he passed behind her to get a book from the shelves. “We’ve both been under a strain, Lydia, and I’m afraid we’ve got to go on being under it.”