"Tell me briefly what you know of that child."
"Not such a lot, excepting she's a dangerous lunatic, having been legally adjudged so yestiddy. And her mother's paying for her keep at a high-class place where she can have special treatment and special care instead of letting her be put away in one of the state asylums. And so I'm taking her there—me and the matron yonder. That's about all, I guess."
"I don't believe it."
"You don't believe what?"
He was beginning to bristle anew.
"Don't believe she is insane at all, much less dangerously so. Why, I've just been talking with her. We exchanged only a few words, but in all that she said she was so perfectly rational, so perfectly sensible. Besides, one has only to look at her to feel sure some terrible mistake or some terrible injustice is being done. Surely there is nothing eccentric, nothing erratic about her; now is there? You must have been studying her. Don't you yourself feel that there might have been something wrong about her commitment?"
He shook his head.
"Not a chancet. Everything's been positively regular and aboveboard. You can't railroad folks into Doctor Shorter's place; he's got too high a standing. Shorter takes no chances with anybody."
"But she seemed so absolutely normal in speech, manner—everything. I've seen insane persons before now and—"