"Not at all," Marshall said. "Not in the least. After all, Sir Kenneth, it's all a matter of adjustment. Simple adjustment and no more." He paused, then added: "Like sex."
"Sex?" Malone said in a voice he hoped was calm.
"Cultural mores," Marshall said. "That sort of thing. Nothing, really." He sat down. "Make yourself comfortable," he told Malone. "As a matter of fact, the delusion Her Majesty suffers from has its compensations for the psychiatrist. Where else could I be appointed Royal Psychiatrist, Advisor to the Crown, and Earl Marshal?"
Malone looked around, found a comfortable chair and dropped into it. "I suppose so," he said. "It must be sort of fun, in a way."
"Oh, it is," Marshall said. "Of course, it can get to be specifically troublesome; all cases can. I remember a girl who'd managed to get herself married to the wrong man—she was trying to escape her mother, or some such thing. And she'd moved into this apartment where her next-door neighbor, a nice woman really, had rather strange sexual tendencies. Well, what with those problems, and the husband himself—a rather ill-tempered brute, but a nice fellow basically—and her eventually meeting Mr. Right, which was inevitable—"
"I'm sure it was very troublesome," Malone put in.
"Extremely," Marshall said. "Worked out in the end, though. Ah ... most of them do seem to, when we're lucky. When things break right."
"And when they don't?" Malone said.
Marshall shook his head slowly and rubbed at his forehead with two fingers. "We do what we can," he said. "It's an infant science. I remember one rather unhappy case—started at a summer theatre, but the complications didn't stop there. As I recall, there were something like seven women and three men involved deeply before it began to straighten itself out. My patient was a young boy. Ah ... he had actually precipitated the situation, or was convinced that he had. All basically nice people, by the way. All of them. But the kind of thing they managed to get mixed up in—"
"I'm sure it was interesting," Malone said. "But—"