“Oh, I’ve known that he’s been definitely ill for a long time,” she answered. “I ought to have called in a doctor before, but I wanted to consult you, so I waited. It was wrong. As it turns out, it was wrong, too, my not letting you speak to Dudley instead of me. You think it would hurt my feelings to hear a doctor say that he is actually mad. But I’ve been through with it already. I know it. The only thing now is treatment, and the sooner it begins the better.”
Grimshaw’s face set sharply in its painful lines.
“Don’t say that he’s mad,” he said, in the most commanding accent she had ever heard him use.
“Just look at him,” she answered.
Dudley Leicester, with the air of a dissipated scarecrow ruined by gambling, was gazing straight in front of him, sunk deep in his chair, his eyes gazing upon nothing, his hands beating a tattoo upon the leather arms.
“I won’t have you say it,” Robert Grimshaw said fiercely.
“Well, the responsibility’s mine,” she answered, and her tiny lips quivered. “There’s my mother dead and Dudley mad, and I’m responsible.”
“No, I’m responsible,” Grimshaw said in a fierce whisper.
“Now come,” she answered; “if I hadn’t married Dudley, mother would never have had her pony-chaise or got pneumonia ...”
“It was I that brought you together,” Grimshaw said.