"Mother and I are going up to Brookses to play bridge. So we'd have been out, if you'd have called. What about Paul?"
"He's living in sin with a dame he's nuts about—and he found out after he went overboard that she's an old understudy from Hattie Blaine's finishing school for young ladies."
"Oh, dear." Rickey can put all her compassion into two syllables—and it's compassion enough for a saint.
"I was dawdling around here cogitating ways and means—"
She giggled. "In the tub, I bet."
"Think what Socrates accomplished in a tub. Not to mention Archimedes."
"The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker," she replied amiably. "Then there was that show-girl who bathed in champagne. Her tub landed her in jail. Any number of people have opened their arteries in tubs. They put tubs under guillotines—north end. A tub cuts both ways, dear—"
"What should I do, then? Maybe you take dust baths. Maybe that makes people brighter. The genius is a quaking mass of emotional mincemeat. Hasn't told a soul but me. Dumped it in my lap. Regarded it as an Act of God that I happened to be here when the confessional mood came over him. Typical physicist—solve any equation but the human."
Rickey said, "Did you see her?"