“I suppose you have come to interview my Father,” I said. “I’m sorry, but he is out. Did you have an appointment?”
“No, I didn’t,” said the young man right out.
I liked his nice bold way of speaking; he was the least shy young man I ever met.
“I don’t believe in appointments. The subject is conscious, primed, braced up, ready with a series of cards, so to speak, which he wishes to force on the patient public—a collection of least characteristic facts which he would like dragged into prominence. It is as if a man should go to the dentist with his mind made up as to the number of teeth that he is to have pulled out, a decision which should always rest with any dentist who respects himself.”
He went running on like that, not a bit shy, or anything, and amused me very much.
“But then the worst of that is, you’ve got no appointment with George, and he is not here to have his teeth pulled out.”
I really so far wasn’t quite sure if he was an interviewer or a dentist, but I kept calm.
“All the better, my dear young lady, that is if you are willing to aid and abet me a little. Then we shall have a thundering good interview, I can promise you. You see, in my theory of interviewing, the actual collaboration of the patient—shall we call him?—is unnecessary. Indeed, it is more in the nature of an impediment. My method, which of course I have very few opportunities of practising, is to seek out his nearest and dearest, those who have the privilege—or annoyance—of seeing him at all hours, at all seasons, unawares. If a painter, ’tis the wife of his brush that I would question; if an author, the partner of his pen—do you take me?”
Yes, I “took” him, and as George had called me a cockatrice—a very favourite term of abuse with him—only that morning, and remembering how she swaggers about being George’s Egeria, I said, “You’ll have to go to Lady Scilly for that!”
“Quite so!” he said very naturally. “Your distinguished parent dedicated his last book to her, did he not? Did you approve, may I ask?”