“Who try to make you?” he asked.
“Oh, my bird Richard, and Nigger the black cat, and Jumbo, the dog,” she replied.
Her eyes closed, then opened strangely wide upon him in an eager, staring appeal.
“Don’t you want to know about me?” she asked. “I want to tell you—I want to tell you. I’m tired of telling it all over to myself.”
The Young Doctor did not want to know. As a doctor he did not want to know.
“Not now,” he said firmly. “Tell me when I come again.”
A look of pain came into her face. “But who can tell when you’ll come again!” she pleaded.
“When I will things to be, they generally happen,” he answered in a commonplace tone. “You are my patient now, and I must keep an eye on you. So I’ll come.”
Again, with an almost spasmodical movement towards him, she said:
“I must tell you. I wanted to tell you the first day I saw you. You seemed the same kind of man my father was. My name’s Louise. It was my mother made me do it. There was a mortgage—I was only sixteen. It’s three years ago. He said to my mother he’d tear up the mortgage if I married him. That’s why I’m here with him—Mrs. Mazarine. But my name’s Louise.”