“Granted his thesis, he’s amazingly coherent,” she said.
“He doesn’t sometimes become some one else, God or a millionaire, or anything of that sort?”
“No. He believes in reincarnation and hints at having lived other lives, but that’s all.”
“Thousands of people do that,” said Lambone.
“And nobody is persecuting him? Nobody makes noises to trouble him or gets at him with X-rays or anything of that sort?”
“Not a shadow of that sort of thing.”
“The man’s sane. Unless he went mad when he walked out of your friends’ studio.”
“I’m for his sanity right out,” said Lambone. “I wish I’d had a chance to talk to him. There’s something—everybody’s chattering now about an Inferiority Complex. Well, isn’t it common for people who have been rather put upon and deceived and so forth, and who don’t want to face the facts of life, to take refuge in an assumed personality? And putting the reveries, the spiritualist séance and so forth all together, doesn’t it work out on those lines?”
“He knows he is really, au fond, Preemby?” Devizes asked.
“It annoyed him to tell him so,” said Christina Alberta. “I think one reason why he went away was because I and my friend, Mrs. Crumb that is, at the studio where we live, would try to make him be sensible about that. It drove him away. He knows he is really Preemby and he hates it. He knows this is all a make-believe.”