“You have their recollection of it, no doubt—but suppose they have forgotten some of it? Sylvia has not forgotten, you may be sure—every word is burned with fire into her brain. She has put with this everything she ever heard on the subject—the experience of her friend, Harriet Atkinson-all that I’ve told her in the past about such things——”
“Ah!” growled Dr. Gibson. “That’s it! If you had not meddled in the beginning——”
“Now, now!” said the other, soothingly. “You ask me to relieve you of the embarrassment of this matter. I quite agree with Mrs. Abbott that there is too much ignorance about these things, but she must recognise, I am sure, that this is not the proper moment for enlightening Mrs. van Tuiver.”
“I do not recognise it at all,” I said. “If her husband will go to her and tell her humbly and truthfully——”
“You are talking madness!” cried the old man, breaking loose again. “She would be hysterical—she would regard him as something loathsome—some kind of criminal——”
“Of course she would be shocked,” I said, “but she has the coolest head of anyone I know—I do not think of any man I would trust so fully to take a rational attitude in the end. We can explain to her what extenuating circumstances there are, and she will have to recognise them. She will see that we are considering her rights——”
“Her rights!” The old man fairly snorted the words.
“Now, now, Dr. Gibson!” interposed the other. “You asked me——”
“I know! I know! But as the older of the physicians in charge of this case——”
Dr. Perrin managed to frown him down, and went on trying to placate me. But through the argument I could hear the old man muttering in his collar a kind of double bass pizzicato: “Suffragettes! Fanatics! Hysteria! Woman’s Rights!”