“Nonsense! Beauty only skin-deep, indeed! It’s liver-deep anyway. Often it’s soul-deep. Do you think you’ve kept your good looks, Grandma Sharpless, just by washing your skin?”
“Don’t you try to dodge the issue by flattery, young man,” said the old lady, the more brusquely in that she could see her son-in-law grinning boyishly at the mounting color in her face. “I’m as the Lord made me.”
“And as you’ve kept yourself, by clean, sound living. Miss Ennis isn’t as the Lord made her or meant her. She’s a mere parody of it. Her basic trouble is an ailment much more prevalent among intelligent people than they are willing to admit. In the books it is listed under various kinds of hyphenated neurosis; but it’s real name is fool-in-the-head.”
“Curable?” inquired Mr. Clyde solicitously.
“There’s no known specific except removing the seat of the trouble with an axe,” announced Dr. Strong. “But cases sometimes respond to less heroic treatment.”
“Not this case, I fear,” put in Mrs. Clyde. “Louise will coddle herself into the idea that you have grossly insulted her. She won’t come back.”
“Won’t she!” exclaimed Mrs. Sharpless. “Insult or no insult, she would come to the bait that Dr. Strong has thrown her if she had to crawl on her knees.”
Come she did, prompt to the hour. From out the blustery February day she lopped into the physician’s pleasant study, slumped into a chair, and held out to him a limp left hand, palm up and fingers curled. Ordinarily the most punctilious of men, Dr. Strong did not move from his stance before the fire. He looked at the hand.
“What’s that for?” he inquired.
“Aren’t you going to feel my pulse?”