He lit his cigarette and watched her in his usual lazy, smoke-veiled manner, but she might have noticed the shaken fabric of his self-assurance.
“Say, now,” said Joan, “what’s that the name for?”
“There’s a book about it over there—third volume on the top shelf—look up your case.”
With an air of profound alarm, she went over and took it out.
“There’s books about everything, ain’t there?—isn’t there,—Mr. Gael? Why, there’s books about lovin’ an’ about sickness an’ about cattle an’ what-not, an’ about women an’ children—” She was shirking the knowledge of her “case,” but at last she pressed her lips together and opened the book. She fell to reading, growing anxiety possessed her face, she sat down on the nearest chair, she turned page after page. Suddenly she gave him a look of anger.
“I ain’t none of this, Mr. Gael,” she said, smote the page, rose with dignity, and returned the book.
He laughed so long and heartily that she was at last forced to join him. “You was—you were—jobbin’ me, wasn’t you?” she said, sighing relief. “Did you know what that volume said? It said like this—I’ll read you about it—” She took the volume, found the place and read in a low tone of horror, he helping her with the hard words: “‘One of the most frequent forms of phobia, common in cases of psychic neurasthenia, is agrophobia in which patients the moment they come into an open space are oppressed by an exaggerated feeling of anxiety. They may break into a profuse perspiration and assert that they feel as if chained to the ground....’ And here, listen to this, ‘batophobia, the fear that high things will fall, atrophobia, fear of thunder and lightning, pantophobia, the fear of every thing and every one’.... Well, now, ain’t that too awful? An’ you mean folks really get that way?”
Their talk was for some time of nervous diseases, Joan’s horror increasing.
“Well, sir,” said she, “lead me out an’ shoot me if I get anyways like that! I believe it’s caused by all that queer dressin’ an’ what-not. I feel like somethin’ real to-day in this shirt an’ all, an’ when I get through some work I’ll feel a whole lot better. Don’t you say I’m one of those nervous breakdowns again, though, will you?” she pleaded.
“No, I won’t, Joan. But don’t make one of me, will you?”