"How absurd—I mean how sad! But she's so healthy; she'll soon recover?"
"I don't know," he said briefly, and something scared me in his voice. "She's a very hard case. A bad age."
We walked in silence through a long glass-walled hall, a sort of conservatory, with palms and caged canaries chirping and trilling.
"I hate those birds!" I cried nervously; he stopped and looked thoughtfully into me—it was no less than that.
"That's interesting," he said abruptly, "I don't like 'em, either. And you're one of the best-balanced women I know. Mother, too—she doesn't care for them. No—nor Beatrix."
Beatrix was the hardy young woman who contemplated marrying him—a tremendous venture, it seemed to me!
"But they seem to like 'em here. The crazier they are (there's nobody bad here, you know) the more they like 'em, ... Did you know mediums and spiritualists and all that sort can't live without 'em? I never heard anybody mention it, but it's so. When I went over to Lourdes, last year, I made a point of looking up the families of the people that had the visions, and they all kept larks in cages——"
I saw he was following some train of thought and kept silence. At length he shrugged his shoulders.
"But that isn't what I asked you out for," he began. "I thought you'd be interested in seeing—Oh, Mrs. Leeth, how are you?"
"Very well, thank you, doctor."