“I pillaged books from the big library as I wanted them,” said the young man humbly. “Do you know, Tommy, to talk quite seriously, I get more erratic every day? Knocking about the world and living alone make me a queer slave of whims. I am straying too far from the normal. I wish to goodness you would take me and drive me back to the ways of common sense.”
“Meaning—?
“That I am getting cranky and diffident. I am beginning to get nervous about people’s opinion and sensitive to my own eccentricity. It is a sad case for a man who never used to care a straw for a soul on earth.”
“Lewie, attend to me,” said Wratislaw, with mock gravity. “You have not by any chance been falling in love?”
The accused blushed like a girl, and lied withal like a trooper, to the delight of the un-Christian George.
“Well, then, my dear fellow, there is hope for you yet. If a man once gets sentimental, he desires to be normal above all things, for he has a crazy intuition that it is the normal which women really like, being themselves but a hair’s-breadth from the commonplace. I suppose it is only another of the immortal errors with which mankind hedges itself about.”
“You think it an error?” said Lewis, with such an air of relief that George began to laugh and Wratislaw looked comically suspicious.
“Why the tone of joy, Lewie?”
“I wanted your opinion,” said the perjured young man. “I thought of writing a book. But that is not the thing I was talking about. I want to be normal, aggressively normal, to court the suffrages of Gledsmuir. Do you know Stocks?”
“Surely.”