"Don't be disturbed," the Queen
said. "Please. I only want to help you, Sir Kenneth; you know that."
"Well, of course I do," Malone said. "But—"
"Heavens to Betsy," she said. "Sir Kenneth, what kind of a detective are you?"
"What?" Malone said, and added at once: "Your Majesty." He knew perfectly well, of course, that Miss Thompson was not Queen Elizabeth I—and he knew that Miss Thompson knew what he thought.
But she didn't mind. Politeness, she held, was the act of being pleasant on the surface, no matter what a person really thought. People were polite to their bosses, she pointed out, even though they were perfectly sure that they could do a better job than the bosses were doing.
So she insisted on the surface pretense that Malone was going through, treating her like a Queen.
The psychiatrists had called her delusion a beautifully rationalized one. As far as Malone was concerned, it made more sense than most of real life.
"That's very nice of you, Sir Kenneth," the Queen said. "But I want to ask you again: what kind of detective are you? Haven't you got any common sense at all?"