I recalled the trait in my own experience of my young friend.
“Ah, yes. He always took pralines when he really wanted chocolate fondants,” sighed his mother. “And then—but perhaps you have forgotten—the dolls?”
I had forgotten the dolls. I suppose I gaped rather stupidly.
“He had three,” gulped Lady Garlingham. “He chose the blue one first, and then, when we had just reached Hyde Park Gate, he cried, and said it was the pink one he had wanted all along. So we went back and got her, and drove home to lunch, which, of course, was Gar’s dinner. And then, if you had seen him, poor darling,”—her maternal bosom heaved with a repressed sob—“with his underlip turned down in a quite South Sea Island way, and the tears tumbling into his rice pudding because the blue creature was absolutely his ideal from the first, you would have been foolish enough to order the carriage and drive him back to the Regent Street toyshop.”
“As you did?”
“As I did,” admitted Lady Garlingham.
“With the result that might have been expected?”
“With the result that seems to me now to be a hateful foreshadowing of what was to be my poor darling’s fate in life,” said the poor darling’s mother.... “No, thank you, Sheila dear, I positively could not touch it,” she added, as the cake-basket came our way. “Not even to dream on—I have quite done with dreaming now.”
“But how,” I asked hypercritically, “could Garlingham’s subsequent choice of the blue doll, originally discarded in favor of the pink, foreshadow his ultimate fate in life?”
“Oh, don’t you understand?” quavered poor Lady Garlingham. “He went into the toyshop by himself, and came marching out with what the Americans call a rag-baby, the most odious, distorted, shapeless horror you can imagine. It fascinated him by its sheer ugliness. He was obsessed, magnetized, compelled.... As in this case!” A burst of confidence broke down the floodgates of the poor woman’s reserve. She grasped me by the arm as she gurgled out hysterically—rocking her slight form to and fro: “My dear, she is the rag-doll, this awful widow creature Garlingham has married. And to his fatal curse of indecision he owes the Incubus that is crushing him to-day.”