“Well—” She considered how she should put it. “He’s behaving queerly. So that people may think—people who don’t know him—that he’s going out of his mind.”
Mr. Lambone reflected. “Was it ever such a very serious mind to go out of?”
“Oh! don’t make jokes. His mind was good enough to keep him out of trouble, and now something’s happened and it isn’t. People will think—some of them think already—he is mad. They may take him away. And there’s just him and me. It’s serious, Uncle. And I don’t know what I ought to do. I don’t know enough to know. I’m scared. I’ve got no friends that I can talk to about it. None. You’d think I’d have women friends. I haven’t. I don’t get on with older women. They want to boss me. Or I think they do. And I irritate them. They know, they feel—the proper ones—that I don’t—oh! respect their standards. And the other sort just hate me. Because I’m young. The girls I know—no good for what I want just now.”
“But isn’t there a man,” said Lambone, “on whom you have a sort of claim?”
“You know who it is, I suppose?”
He was frank. “Things rather show.”
“If you know him—” She left the sentence unfinished.
“I know the young man only very incidentally,” he said.
“I go to Teddy,” said Christina Alberta without any further reservations. “I went to him as a matter of fact before I telephoned to you. He hardly listened to what I had to say. He didn’t bother.” She winced. Suddenly tears stood in her eyes. “He was just loafing about in his studio. He kissed me and tried to excite me. He would hardly listen to what I had to tell him.... That I suppose is what one gets from a lover.”
“So it’s got to that,” Paul Lambone reflected with hidden dismay, and then remarked a little belatedly: “Not every lover.”