A busy, quiet, elderly woman, plainly dressed, cut across our path through the long conservatory.
"Everything all right to-day?"
"Everything, I think, thank you, doctor."
There was nothing to remark about her until she lifted her eyes, and then the curious, intense depth of them (like a dog who could speak, I thought), held me almost breathless with sympathy. She looked, somehow, as if she had gone through more than would be right for her to tell.
"Poor creature," I said as she disappeared through a baize door. "Tell me about her. What is her trouble?"
"She has none that I know of," he replied quietly. "She's the housekeeper."
"Good Heavens, Will! I think I should go mad myself, if I lived here! How does one tell them apart?"
"I don't think one does, always," he remarked placidly. "I sometimes think that accounts for a good deal! There's a man, now—see that fussy little fellow getting out of his motor coat? That's Jarvyse."
"The Jarvyse? The great specialist?"
"That's it," he grunted with a disrespectful grin. "From my point of view, you know, aunty, he might about as well stay in, now he's here. I wouldn't go too near him, if I were you—he'll say you're a paranoiac, if you mention your prejudice against free silver or thick soup at dinner or steam heat. Everything's been paranoia with him since 1902. It's just as much an idée fixe as anybody's here. If you object to anything he says, he diagnoses you immediately. You couldn't build asylums fast enough to hold all Jarvyse's paranoiacs! That's why I'm here, by the way; the case I want you to see is really father's. But he loses his temper so, when he meets Jarvyse, that he sends me up, instead. The old boy doesn't bother me—'Morning, doctor."