He stopped short.
“Always,” said Christina Alberta, after a long pause.
“We’ve been into all that,” said Devizes and paused, and was for a minute entirely at a loss for words. “Yes,” he said at last.
Her heart was beating fast and there was a flush of excitement on her cheeks. Her quick wits had filled in all the gaps. She understood now—and then again it vanished. She would have liked to have gone away and thought it all over at once. But that wouldn’t do. She must disregard the questions that surged up within her. Her mind went forward like an obstinate traveller caught in a whirlwind. Her mother for example. She was trying to recall something about her mother that had long been stifled in her mind. “Went away and left me to it,” was it? “Went off and left me to it?” Her mother lying in bed and wandering. Who had left her to what? That standing perplexity. That suspicion. That dream. But attend to him now, Christina Alberta; attend to him! She was observing him with all her being, and yet she seemed deaf to what he said.
He was saying that now that he agreed with them that Preemby was sane, he could see his way to the real business before them. It was the old, old story of making lunatics out of sane people which they encountered in Preemby’s case. It was the old, old story of making lunatics out of sane people which they encountered in Preemby’s case. (He repeated his sentence word for word without apparently realizing he had said it twice.) All exceptional people were in danger of being misunderstood, but such a type as Preemby, original and yet incapable of abstract expression or philosophical method, which sought fantastic expression for its feelings and impulses, was particularly liable to give offence, awaken suspicion and dread and hostility. It was just these borderland cases he was always trying to save from asylums, and just such cases that were always going there. And they were the last people to bring into contact with real insanity. “To go back to my metaphor, the basketful of fruit isn’t rotten, is scarcely speckled with decay, but it is disordered and overturned. A mind is a delicate thing to knock about. It will rot very easily, and a mind like your father’s particularly will rot very easily under asylum conditions. After all this rigmarole I come to just the conclusion you’ve already reached, that we have to get Preemby out of Cummerdown Hill and away under restful conditions as soon as possible. When we’ll comb out his particular complex and get him into working relations with the world again. I’m quite sure we can do that somehow, make his incognito permanent, make him an Emperor in exile, restore his proper name, organize a common daily round for him and get him back more and more to be a chastened and released Preemby.”
He paused.
“That’s it,” said Lambone, roused from a profound contemplation of the two interesting faces before him.
“It isn’t easy. Even to get at him isn’t easy. There will be delays. A careless magistrate and a silly doctor can make a lunatic in five minutes. It takes no end of time to unmake one.”
“That’s what I want to set about doing,” said Christina Alberta.
“Naturally,” said Devizes, “and I’m with you.”