It was my first professional visit to the Robinsons. I had been called in to prescribe for Arthur Robinson, a nervous, emaciated young man, whom I found extended on a black satin sofa, in a purple silk dressing gown embroidered with life-sized hydrangeas. The sofa and the dressing gown shrieked aloud his artistic temperament.
He had a bronchial cold, and my visit was, as he said, purely precautionary. He kept me a long time recounting his symptoms, and assuring me that he was absolutely fearless, and then dragged himself to his feet and led me into the magnificent studio his mother had built for him, where his sketches were arranged on easels, and where we found his wife, a pale, dark-eyed young creature cleaning his brushes.
He appeared—like most egotistic people—to be greatly in need of a listener, and he poured forth his views on art, and the form his own message to the world would probably take. I am unfortunately quite inartistic, but I gave him my attention. I was in no hurry, for at that time the one perpetual anxiety that dogged my waking hours was that I had not enough patients.
At last I remembered that I ought not to appear to have time to spare, and his wife took me downstairs to the drawing-room, where his mother was awaiting us, a large, fair woman, with a kindly foolish face.
I saw at once that I was in for another interview as long as the first.
Mrs. Robinson did not wait for me to give an opinion on her son’s condition. She pressed me to be perfectly frank, and, before I could open my mouth to reply, poured forth a stream of information on what was evidently her only theme—Arthur’s health.
“I said the day before yesterday—didn’t I, Blanche. ‘Arthur, you have got a cold.’ And he said, so like him—‘No Mother, I haven’t.’ That is Arthur all over. Isn’t it, Blanche?”
Blanche made no response. She sat motionless, gazing at her mother-in-law with half absent eyes, as if she were trying—and failing—to give her whole attention to the matter in hand.
“Then I said in my joking way, ‘Arthur, I can’t have you starting a cold, and giving it to me and Blanche.’ We don’t want any presents of that kind. Do we, Blanche?”
Blanche made no reply. Perhaps experience had taught her that it was a waste of energy.