“I’m no actress, anyhow.”
“Every woman is an actress. As safe to bet on as that no woman knows the sort of man she’ll fall in love with. Look at Polly. Love, for that matter, is often due to the planting of a suggestion on one side or the other.”
“Polly says Dr. Pelham told her that love is——Oh, lord! Can I remember all that? Matter of over-secretion of hormones in cells next door to some kind of follicles.”
Eustace burst into a roar of laughter. “Sounds like old Geoff. Is that the sort of diet he feeds Polly on? She must be in love with him if she can stand it!”
“Polly’s up on endocrines. Every once in a while she and Elsie get going on the subject, but I always shut them up. Never did like the idea of knowing too much about my inwards. Don’t know which side my liver is on and always dodged physiology at school. Suppose it’s because I never was ill in my life. Besides, as far as I can make out, they wouldn’t take much interest in endocrines if one set didn’t happen to be stocked up with sex and made the others dance to its tune more or less. That’s enough for me. By the way, what do you think Elsie told me the other day—said she thought the time had come when I could stand it——” She paused abruptly and jerked her shoulders, her brows an unbroken and twisted line.
“I’d be interested to know.” His eyes narrowed to conceal a smile.
“I hate to repeat it and she made me so furious I could have thrown something at her. Said the reason I never could look like a boy was because I had no male cells in some place or other—that if I had, with the morbid psychology induced by my early experience and hatred of your sex, nothing could have ‘saved’ me. I wonder if people were always sex-mad!”
“Probably. Today they are more verbally interested because for the first time they know something of cause instead of merely taking effect for granted, and romanticizing it. But Elsie was quite right. You have an uncommonly balanced endocrine constitution and you may be thankful——”
“I prefer not to think about it.”
“Don’t. Forget it by all means.”