“He stands for nothing,” I said one day to Janet and the Doctor.
“O yes he does,” laughed Janet. “He stands for the forgotten art of living unconsciously. He has rediscovered a lost point of view.”
Janet usually refused to talk of the Lad, but to-day she took up the cudgels in his defence.
“I like that radiant scepticism. There is nothing negative about it. I sometimes think that the Lad has more than his share of the primal creative impulse that is at the heart of all things. His energy always urges him forward. The rest of us are working backward, by an analysis that is death, as if the meaning of life lay behind us and not before.”
“Janet,” said the Doctor, “did you think of that just now, or did you make it up before?”
“I thought of it a long time ago,” answered Janet, raising her chin saucily, but flushing, “and I wrote it down in my note-book.”
Janet herself was one of our most interesting subjects at these afternoon séances. I was constantly tempted into a bit of analysis at her expense: she was so complex, so puzzling.
I have regretted since our free discussions of one another. We considered them impersonal, artistic, critical. One’s friends, I have come to think, should serve other ends than those of amateur psychology.
CHAPTER XXVII
While we wrestled with our problems, baby Jean wrestled with a great many that were all her own. The difference between her and the rest of us was that she said nothing.