“Did she? I suppose then you’d better convey to McCloud, somehow, that I won’t be long with Mrs. Dickerman. Tell Mrs. Dickerman that I will be free in another few minutes. Do that now, please, and then come back to take this record. Pardon all this, Dick. Have a cigarette?”
From the brief exchange between doctor and secretary, Dick had been able to form a pretty complete mental picture of what was back of it. Mrs. Dickerman must be some slightly neurotic lady of wealth who was falling over herself to pay fabulous fees to Lewis for a little mental coddling, while the rather gorgeous but definitely shabby dark-browed young giant was, of course, a charity case, and in real trouble. But supposing their needs had been equal, Dick suspected his friend still would favor the penniless down-and-outer, for Lewis was slightly snobbish in his mistrust of wealth and position. It was a little perverse in him. Even his own sister, Cynthia, thought so.
Dick frowned to himself. This matter of Lewis’ prejudice against paying patients was rather pertinent to himself at the moment on account of the errand which had brought him here. What could Petra Farwell seem to Lewis beyond what Dick himself thought her—a beautiful but dull ingénue whose psychic maladjustments (if that was the term) were the result of too much leisure and spoiling?
Dick took out his cigarette case, waving Lewis’ aside, for Lewis, he knew, was as economical when it came to cigarette brands as he was about clothes and office furniture. What a bare room this sanctum was! The reception office had been on the luxurious side, but that was Cynthia’s taste and doing. She had insisted on decorating it, and Dick could not doubt she had drawn on her own purse for most of the accessories. But even as he passed it up, Dick noticed that Lewis’ cigarette case holding the Luckies or whatever they were, was rather wonderful. Finest jade. You could see at a glance. Marvelous color. Some grateful woman patient, of course, had forced the gem on Lewis, and probably he did not dream what its value was; if he did, he would sell it, to give to the deserving poor....
Miss Frazier was back and ready with her shorthand pad. Since they were smoking, Dick offered her a cigarette, one of his own Club variety. But she refused it, coldly, her eyes on her pad. Dick did not so much get the idea of having been put in his place as of the secretary having insisted on keeping hers, which was that of an invisible, impersonal automaton—a dicta-phone with judgment. Suddenly Dick did not mind talking before her.
“It’s a stepmother stepdaughter situation,” he explained to Lewis. “The stepmother is my friend. She is a wonderful person. She knows that you and I are related in a way. (The relationship between them consisted in the fact that Lewis’ sister, Cynthia, was married to Dick’s first cousin, Harry Allen.) And she got the idea that because of the relationship I might have some sort of a pull with you, do you see? But perhaps that’s stupid. Perhaps nobody has a pull with you in that sense. I warned her. Is it stupid?”
Lewis smiled, that peculiar fleeting smile of his. But it was for himself this time. He had assumed the position he kept through all these office interviews. His chair was swung half around on its pivot so that he did not directly face the patient, and his eyes, for the most part, were on the knob of the door leading into Miss Frazier’s little private office. “Of course you have pull, Dick, all the pull in the world. But I don’t see what that has to do with it. When it comes to taking on patients, one does it on the merits of the cases themselves, naturally. Let me hear.”
“Well, it’s the stepdaughter who is—funny. Clare, who is my friend the stepmother, do you see, is utterly devoted to the girl. In fact, to my mind, she is almost obsessed with the idea that it’s up to her to make the girl happy. That’s far-fetched, of course. You can’t do that for any one. But Clare tries desperately. And all she gets for her pains is very nice polite manners and nothing under ’em. It is absurd. You would think so—you will think so—when you see Clare. But even if Clare weren’t so wonderful as she is, the girl’s indifference would still be absurd, for just on the material side she owes Clare everything she’s got in the world. She and her father were as poor as poverty until Clare came into their lives, married the father. Now that she is there, their lives are all luxury.—Charm.—Beauty too. But what good does it do? Clare is only getting her heart broken.
“But I ought to tell you,” Dick went on quickly, after a second’s pause in which he had suddenly remembered some last admonishments of Clare’s, “Clare doesn’t mind personal heartbreaks and things like that. That is not why she wants you to psychoanalyze the girl. It is for the girl’s own sake and her father’s sake. She doesn’t want those two to become estranged. And it is bound to happen if things go on the way they are going. The girl must be more responsive to Clare, return some of her devotion, or the father is going to begin to feel the antagonism in the air and blame his daughter for it. For, in a choice of loyalties, the man is Clare’s. It isn’t Clare’s fault it’s that way, though. From the very beginning she has worked to preserve—even to create—a fine relationship between her husband and his daughter. She is big enough, detached enough, to keep herself and her personal disappointments out of the situation and think only of those two. And that’s why she sent me here, at dollars a minute, I suppose, to ask you to see the girl and straighten her out. She has an idea that there is some deeply hidden resentment—some mix-up, anyway—in the girl’s subconscious mind and that it only needs you to excavate it. She thinks—”
But there Dick faltered. Lewis was smiling and no longer fleetingly. Miss Frazier, noticing Dick look around for it, pushed an ashtray along the desk toward him. He crushed out his cigarette stub in it, looking miserable and a little angry. “I can see what you’re thinking, Lewis,” he exclaimed. “You think that it is a simple case of stepdaughterish jealousy and that Clare and I are just too ingenuous for words to have come bothering a top-notch psychiatrist with it. But you happen to be wrong. You don’t know the people. Petra’s not jealous. Not for a minute. She hasn’t enough warmth in her for such a passion, if it comes to that. Really, she’s no jollier with her own father than with her stepmother. But Clare doesn’t see that. She thinks it’s only herself Petra pushes off. And what is there so absurd in her getting the idea that you might help?”