The three of them carried Ivor down the stairs to Harvey’s car outside. He was heavy, for all his thinness. He woke up once, just to say absurdly: “You’re carrying me.”
“Observant of you!” mocked Gerald.
In the car they had him between them, a large bulky figure in Gerald’s rug and eiderdown. He was past listening to anything now.
“What on earth has he been up to?” Harvey asked Trevor in a whisper, across him. “To go about like this! He must have felt it coming on all day—and yesterday, too!”
“God knows,” Trevor said.
But both men knew well enough, in a sort of way. Dr. Harvey knew London as well as medicine, and he had known Magdalen Gray for years. He pursed his lips.
“That woman,” he whispered grimly, “burns whatever she touches. Always.” (It is a well-known fact that doctors in private life get frightfully dramatic about women.)
Trevor was silent.
“It’s an irony about her,” Harvey went on. “She’s kind, oh, very kind! but she always makes a mess of men. This young man, now. She breaks ’em, in the end. I’ve known a few.”
“Yes, but she makes them first,” Trevor said suddenly. “You’re talking without your book, Harvey. She makes men, I tell you, out of the ordinary idiots whom she falls in love with. This one isn’t an absolute idiot, but he’s young, and that comes to the same thing in this case. She’s been worth-while to him, and she will always be worth-while to him. She’s a woman of quality, Harvey.” And Gerald Trevor smiled....