“I am Mrs. Tom Otis, Doctor Pryne. A friend of the Farwells. Mr. Farwell has commissioned me to see you in his place. He is at a critical point in the new novel, and if he leaves it, he’s lost. You know how that is, since you write yourself. He is working in my house,—has his study there. He wants you to tell me your ‘findings’ here—if that’s the word—and then, when he comes to earth again, I’m to report to him. Do you see?”
Mrs. Otis had spoken in a lowered voice in spite of Mrs. Farwell’s closed door, and now she found a chair for herself with the obviously gracious intention of permitting Lewis to do the same. She appeared so altogether ingenuous a person that Lewis was fain to divert his irritation over the stupidity of the situation to the absent Lowell Farwell. Meanwhile he tried to get away from this Mrs. Otis as promptly and tactfully as possible.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m glad Mr. Farwell didn’t interrupt his work. There’s no reason why he should. Doctor MacKay will get in touch with me to-morrow and he’ll give Mr. Farwell my ‘findings’ such as they are, I suppose.”
He was looking for his hat, but wondering about Petra and Teresa. Why had they had to go away? He had meant to ask them where they had found the gentians.
“Here it is,” Mrs. Otis moved aside, so that he saw the dish of gentians, and then his hat beside them. “But please don’t go right away. Mr. Farwell will think I have failed him if you go without telling me what you think about Marian. It was stupid of me, perhaps, not to have explained myself more fully before I asked you to tell me. You couldn’t understand, of course. You couldn’t know how very close I am to these people. Why, it was I who persuaded them to get you. I couldn’t bear the way things were going. Something had to be done. Doctor MacKay is so tiresomely conservative. Any wise, up-to-date doctor would have seen long ago that Marian Farwell ought to go right away—to a sanitarium—abroad—anywhere—but away. It isn’t fair to let neurotics inflict their nerves on people who are perfectly sane and healthy. And it’s all the worse when an extremely sensitive artist like Lowell Farwell is the victim! You think so too, don’t you?”
But Mrs. Otis had not waited for Lewis’ answer. She took his agreement for granted and hurried on. “Doctor Pryne, see here. I am so eager—and more important, perhaps—able to help. Did you think I was merely curious and officious? That would be too hateful of me, if it were true. But it isn’t. This affair is almost as much mine as it is Lowell’s—theirs, the Farwells’, I mean. I got Mr. Farwell to call you in, I am paying your fees, and I will send Marian abroad, anywhere, to-morrow, if you will only say the word. We—Society—owe to first-rate artists their chance for good working conditions. Well, you and I between us can manage things for this particular artist right now. He won’t let me give Marian the money for Europe as things are, just for my urging it. But if you say she must go— Don’t you see?”
Mrs. Otis had seemed to Lewis at the time a rather delightful person. A magnetic smile and an air of almost naïve simplicity had robbed what she said, and implied, of too much stupidity. And she went on to speak of her wealth with simplicity. “What use is all this money,” she asked, eyes shining and wide, “if I can’t do some ordinary human good with it outside of organized charity, and without fuss? What I can’t spend myself—spend beautifully, I mean—certainly belongs to the next person who needs it. And Marian, poor darling, is really and truly my next person. It’s as simple as that.”
But Mrs. Farwell, to Lewis’ mind, was neither mentally nor physically ill. She was a “happiness hound,” nothing else in the world, and he could not honestly prescribe Europe or a sanitarium as a cure for a deeply rooted perversion in human character. Yet getting away without committing himself to coöperation in Mrs. Otis’ naïve philanthropic schemes was difficult, the more so since he could not, of course, tell her his “findings.” But Lewis managed it at last and Dick’s errand here just now seemed to indicate that she had not stayed permanently resentful, however she had felt at the time.
And then, before anything of his call at the Cambridge apartment had had time to fade from Lewis’ memory, the papers were full of the divorce of Lowell and Marian Farwell. A little while more and two marriages were front-page news, Lowell Farwell to Mrs. Clare Otis née Fay, and Mrs. Marian Farwell, née Dodge to—somebody or other. The name hardly mattered since it was merely her recent connection with the celebrated novelist which gave the happiness hound’s new marriage its ephemeral public interest. And now, less than three years after that so simple solution of their problems—and a wonder Mrs. Clare had not hit on it sooner and had ever bothered to try plotting with a psychiatrist!—she had Lewis again marked down as a fellow conspirator.
What did she want to buy from him this time, Lewis asked himself. Her stepdaughter’s affection, according to Dick. But that would be only part of it. With three years for perspective, Lewis was more than a little doubtful of “Clare’s” simplicity. But he could not guess what she might be wanting. It would be interesting to see, possibly. And in any case, there would be Petra. And Teresa Kerr. Who was Teresa Kerr, anyway, and where was she now, Lewis wondered. Well, Petra could tell him that. He would ask her on Saturday, the first thing.