"Your case interests me and I'll consider this matter of advising you."
"I shall expect the document tomorrow afternoon!"
"I should want to be very sure," she laughed, "that you were really leaving town and that I shouldn't see you for a long time—perhaps never again!"
"That has an ominous sound, as though you were going to give me a death sentence! Is my case as bad as that?"
"Not at all; but it calls for that disagreeable frankness we all dislike in our friends and very properly resent in mere acquaintances. I should be enormously embarrassed to meet you until after—"
She paused and surveyed him once more, questioningly. The French lady was telling a story to the whole company, and they were obliged to give heed to it; and as Archie failed to catch the point of it Miss Perry very kindly gave him the clue. The talk was general for a few minutes and then he begged her to finish the sentence that had been left in the air.
"Oh, it doesn't matter! I think I was going to say that it would be embarrassing to see you until after you had given my little hints a trial. I'll say now that just the orderly course of your life, with four miles a day, no more, no less, isn't a bit likely to get you anywhere. My treatment for such a case as yours would be very drastic. I'd set you some real stunts to do if you were my patient. May tells me that they won't have you in the army, the navy, or the flying corps, but I believe I could find some excitement for you," she ended musingly.
"As, for example—?" he asked, finding the French lady conspiring with an attaché of the Italian embassy. "To meet the competition of the nerve specialists, you'll have to be very explicit and tell me exactly what to do."
"Right there is one of your troubles—living by fixed schedules. You've never felt the world's rough hand; you don't know life! Clubs and sanatoriums and week-ends in comfortable houses don't count. You're a tremendously formal person, Mr. Bennett! What you really need is a good hard jar! Every morning you know exactly what you're going to do every hour of the day. It's routine that kills! Now just suppose when you're out on one of your walks you were to overpower the chauffeur of, we will say, the British ambassador, and drive the car bearing his Excellency into some lonely fastness of the Virginia hills, and hold him for a ransom, and collect the money in twenty-dollar gold pieces and escape with it and then come back to Washington and spend it all on a big party with the ambassador as the guest of honor. There would be a real achievement—something that would make you famous in two hemispheres."
"And incidentally lock me up for life if I escaped being shot! Such an escapade would very likely spoil our cordial relations with England and cause no end of trouble."