"I was wondering," said Marigold, "whether, if I put it to her as a personal favour, she might not be willing to see Edith again and persuade her that she was only joking?"
A light began to break upon the Professor.
"What do you think has happened?" he asked.
"Well," explained Marigold, "I take it that your young foreign friend has met my wife and talked politics to her, and that what has happened is the result. She must be a young person of extraordinary ability; but it would be only losing one convert, and I could make it up to her in—in other ways." He spoke with unconscious pathos. It rather touched the Professor.
"It might mean," said the Professor—"that is, assuming that it can be done at all—Mrs. Marigold's returning to her former self entirely, taking no further interest in politics whatever."
"I should be so very grateful," answered Marigold.
The Professor had mislaid his spectacles, but thinks there was a tear in Marigold's eye.
"I'll do what I can," said the Professor. "Of course, you mustn't count on it. It may be easier to start a woman thinking than to stop her, even for a—" The Professor checked himself just in time. "I'll talk to her," he said; and Marigold gripped his hand and departed.
It was about time he did. The full extent of Malvina's activities during those few midsummer weeks, till the return of Flight Commander Raffleton, will never perhaps be fully revealed. According to the Doctor, the whole business has been grossly exaggerated. There are those who talk as if half the village had been taken to pieces, altered and improved and sent back home again in a mental state unrecognisable by their own mothers. Certain it is that Dawson, R.A., generally described by everybody except his wife as "a lovable little man," and whose only fault was an incurable habit of punning, both in season—if such a period there be—and more often out, suddenly one morning smashed a Dutch interior, fifteen inches by nine, over the astonished head of Mrs. Dawson. It clung round her neck, recalling biblical pictures of the head of John the Baptist, and the frame-work had to be sawn through before she could get it off. As to the story about his having been caught by Mrs. Dawson's aunt kissing the housemaid behind the waterbutt, that, as the Doctor admits, is a bit of bad luck that might have happened to anyone. But whether there was really any evidence connecting him with Dolly Calthorpe's unaccountable missing of the last train home, is of course, a more serious matter. Mrs. Dawson, a handsome, high-spirited woman herself, may have found Dawson, as originally fashioned, trying to the nerves; though even then the question arises: Why have married him? But there is a difference, as Mrs. Dawson has pointed out, between a husband who hasn't enough of the natural man in him and a husband who has a deal too much. It is difficult to regulate these matters.
Altogether, and taking an outside estimate, the Doctor's opinion is that there may have been half a dozen, who, with Malvina's assistance, succeeded in hypnotising themselves into temporary insanity. When Malvina, a little disappointed, but yielding quite sweetly her own judgment to that of the wise and learned Christopher, consented to "restore" them, the explanation was that, having spent their burst of ill-acquired energy, they fell back at the first suggestion to their former selves.