"Oh, and besides," rallied the woman instantly. "I thought, likely as not, that there might be some girl. Somebody you could coach! About my passion for shopping, I mean! I don't care who gets the things! If there's anybody you like, she might just as well be the one!"
"Thank you," rebristled the Young Doctor. "But I don't happen to know any girls!"
"Good enough!" said the woman. "Then there's nothing at all to complicate your coming!"
"But I'm not coming!" stared the Young Doctor. The pupils of his eyes were dilated 33like a deer's jacked suddenly with an infuriating light.
"But you are coming," said the woman without a flicker of emotion. "Day after tomorrow it is. At three-thirty from the Pennsylvania Station."
"I'm not!" said the Young Doctor.
"You are!" said the woman.
When it comes right down to the matter of statistics, just how many times in your life you've had your own way and just how many times you haven't, Mrs. Tome Gallien was not exaggerating when she boasted to the Young Doctor that she was quite in the habit of having her own way. She certainly was! In the majority of incidents she had, indeed, always had her own way. And in the majority of incidents she had her own way now. That is to say, that the South Carolina train did leave the Pennsylvania Station at just exactly the time she said it would. And Martha the deaf was on that train. And she, herself, was on that train.
But the Young Doctor was not.
"Not much! Not much!" was the way the 34Young Doctor said it, if you really want to know.