“This is the very kindest thing I ever heard of!” said Mrs. Segrave, holding out her fat little hand to my mother.
“You have saved a family man from suicide, my dear madam!” said the doctor in the heartiest tone.
“Father!” protested Sybil, “there you are making such a character for us! Mrs. Wallace will set us down as a family of mad Americans. I assure you, Mrs. Wallace, we are all perfectly in our right minds, and very grateful to you.”
This sortie broke the ice into splinters. We all laughed, shook hands, and sat down, and the doctor began forthwith to pour out his troubles. Their name was legion. He had not been twenty-four hours in the house, and the concierge had already driven him to the verge of insanity.
“If I could speak to the rascal, I’d be a match for him, and soon make him know I would stand no nonsense,” he went on to explain. “But that’s where he has me on the hip, as Shakspere says; he keeps jabbering on, and I can’t answer the fellow. I know what he’s driving at, I know he’s robbing me; but what aggravates me most is that he thinks he’s fooling me.”
My mother poured all the oil she could on these angry waters, and in ten minutes I could see that she and the doctor were sworn friends.
Sybil listened so far to the conversation with an air of amused interest, just as I was doing; then abruptly turning from it, as if she had had enough of the subject, “You are a musician, I see,” she said—my harp and piano stood open ready for action. “I am perfectly devoted to music! I will come up and play duets with you, if you let me?” I said I should be delighted.
“But I like talking ten thousand times better than music,” she went on. “Music is a way of expressing one’s self with another instrument than one’s tongue; but one tires of it after a while. One never tires of talking; I never do.”
I could readily believe this, but assented as to a general proposition.
“Do you read a great deal?” she continued. “I don’t. I find life is too absorbing, too full; one has no time left for reading. Have you? Human beings are the books I enjoy most. I am so intensely interested in my fellow-creatures! I like to study them, to turn them inside out, to analyze their characters, to exchange views with them. I do so enjoy discussing life. Don’t you?”