“Nope—both of you; and the reason for that is that I talk to you. I can always tell. I have only two joys in life—curiosity about life itself, and talk. I’ve stayed up all night for a good confab with the right person. But only certain persons can I talk with. Don’t know why; but I trust the instinct. With you and Jerry I am garrulous and contented. That’s enough for me. There is another reason why I want to go—I’m extremely interested in Walter. Curiosity about life, as I told you, is one of my passions. I want to unravel his mental puzzle if I can; and I think I can. I’m on a most exciting clue——”
Should he tell her the whole truth; that she was directly responsible for the boy’s downfall; that her impatient arrogance, her stupidity in not realizing that a sensitive man does not enjoy a public reprimand from even his mother, was the beginning of all the evil that followed? He looked at her aged face and decided to say nothing.
“A most exciting clue,” he repeated.
“Those reasons don’t seem adequate to me.” She looked at him with smiling suspicion.
“Oh, there are other reasons, no doubt,” he agreed; “only I don’t know them. They’ll come out later. They always do. The subliminal—the self inside, deeper than consciousness—it is at work, I suppose, here as everywhere. I am expressing my predestined self. But, of course, I don’t hold myself responsible for that. That’s in the hands of the gods. My soul-mate may be up on that lake of yours—dispensing soda in one of Quackenbuster’s drug stores.”
“Quackenbush,” she corrected, amused at his air.
“Is it? All right. That’s one thing I don’t have to remember. Quackenbush or Quackenbuster, it’s the business of destiny, not mine. Although, I suppose, when the time comes I’ll crow a lot about my good judgment. Every blade of grass, no doubt, believes it has chosen green for a colour.... But, why aren’t my reasons adequate?”
“Well, they are not normal——”
“Ah!” he interrupted. “That’s exactly what I claim to be, normal. It’s the rest of the conventional world that’s abnormal.”
“Do you remember the Quaker,” she commented, “who said to his wife, ‘Martha, all the world’s queer, excepting me and thee—and thee’s a little queer’?”