“Yes.”
“Let’s hope that lasts. I don’t see that a man is insane because he believes he is a King or an Emperor—if some one tells him he is. After all, George V has no other grounds for imagining he is a King. The only difference is that rather more people have told him so. Fancying yourself a King isn’t lunacy, and behaving in accordance with that idea isn’t lunacy either. It may be some day, but it isn’t so yet. No.”
“But I’m afraid that people will think that it is.... You see it’s only in the last few days I’ve realized how fond I am of my father and how horrible it would be for me if anyone attempted to take him away. I’m afraid of asylums. Restraint for those who can least understand restraint. He particularly would go mad in a week, really mad, if he got into one. That Mr. Hockleby has frightened me—he’s frightened me. He was so intent and cruel. He was evil about Daddy—malignant. A nasty man.”
“Yes, I know,” said Lambone. “Hate.”
“Yes,” she said. “Hate.”
She jumped to her feet and took possession of the hearthrug, looking with her bobbed hair and short skirts and manly pose and serious face the most ridiculous and attractive mixture of fresh youth and mature responsibility conceivable.
“You see, I don’t know what they can do with him—whether they can take him away from me. I’ve never been much afraid of what might happen before, but I am now. I don’t know how to take hold of all this. I thought life was just a lark and people were fools to be afraid of doing anything. But now I see life’s dangerous. I’ve never been much afraid of what happened to myself. But this is different. He’s walking about in a dream of glory—with absolute wretchedness hanging over him. Think of it! People getting hold of him! Perhaps hitting him! An asylum!”
“About the law on these matters I know very little,” Lambone reflected. “I doubt if they can do very much to him without your consent. But I agree about asylums. From their very nature they must be horrible places, haunted places. Most of the attendants—hardened. Even if they start well. Every day at it ... too much for anyone.... I don’t know how a lunatic is made, a legal lunatic I mean, or who has a right to take him. Somebody—I think two doctors—have to certify him or something of that sort. But, anyhow, I don’t think your father is a lunatic.”
“Nor I. But that may not save him.”
“Something else may. He’s as you say an imaginative—a super-imaginative man, possessed by a fantastic idea. Well, isn’t that a case perhaps for a psycho-analyst?”