"And why not?" he asked, a smile on his thin lips. He helped himself to a cigar, still looking at her whimsically, and biting off its end held a match ready to strike, as if awaiting her next remark.
"But don't you ever want to get away, to go back to the city? Don't you feel—isolated?"
"Why should we? Because there's no opera or dinner parties? We have a dinner party every night." He lighted his cigar and grinned at Isabelle. "The city delusion is one of the chief idiocies of our day. City people encourage the idea that you can't get on without their society. Man was not meant to live herded along sidewalks. The cities breed the diseases for us doctors,—that is their one great occupation."
He threw the match into the fire, leaned back in his chair with his hands knit behind his head, and fastening his black eyes on Isabelle began to talk.
"I lived upwards of twenty years in cities with that same delusion,—not daring to get more than a trolley-car fare away from the muck and noise. Then I was kicked out,—had to go, thank God! On the Arizona plains I learned to know what an idiot I had been to throw away the better half of a life in a place where you have to breathe other peoples' bad air. Why, there isn't room to think in a city! I never used to think, or only at odd moments. I lived from one nervous reflex to another, and took most of my ideas from other folks. Now I do my own thinking. Just try it, young woman; it is a great relief!"
"But—but—" Isabelle stammered, laughing in spite of herself.
"You know," Renault bore on tranquilly, "there's a new form of mental disease you might call 'pavementitis'—the pavement itch. When the patient has it badly, so that he can't be happy when removed from his customary environment, he is incurable. A man isn't a sound man, nor a woman a healthy woman, who can't stand alone on his own two legs and be nourished intellectually and emotionally away from the herd…. That young fellow who has just gone out was a bad case of pavementitis when he came to me,—couldn't breathe comfortably outside the air of New York. Hard worker, too. He came up here to 'rest.' Rest! Almost nobody needs rest. What they want is hard work and tranquil minds. I put him on his job the day he came. You couldn't drive him away now! Last fall I sent him back to see if the cure was complete. Telegraphed me in a week that he was coming up,—life was too dull down there! … And that little black-haired woman who is talking to Mrs. Pole,—similar case, only it was complicated. She was neurotic, hysterical, insomniac, melancholy,—the usual neurasthenic ticket. Had a husband who didn't suit or a lover, I suspect, and it got fastened in the brain,—rode her. She's my chief nurse in the surgical ward now,—a tremendous worker; can go three nights without sleep if necessary and knows enough to sleep soundly when she gets the chance…. Has relapses of pavementitis now and then, when some of her fool friends write her; but I fix that! … So it goes; I have had incurable cases of course, as in everything else. The only thing to do with 'em then is to send them back to suck their poison until it kills."
The whimsical tone of irony and invective made Isabelle laugh, and also subtly changed her self-preoccupation. Evidently Dr. Renault was not a Potts to go to with a long story of woe.
"I thought it was surgery, your specialty," she remarked, "not nervous prostration."
"We do pretty much everything here—as it is needed. Come in to-morrow morning sometime and look the shop over."