"So does t'other old lady—she your daughter's got there now. You'll scratch each other's eyes out over that young monkey when you come to meet, Mrs. Marrable."
"There now, doctor, you will always have your joke. Ruth—my daughter—is quite beside her judgment about the old soul. What like is she, doctor, to your thinking?"
"Well—your daughter's right about her." He paused a moment, and then added, meaningly:—"So far as being a very—very taking sort of old person goes."
Granny Marrable, rather absorbed in her descendant's relations with his bottle, found in due course an opportunity to answer, looking up at the doctor:—"A very taking old person? But what, then, is to seek in her? Unless she be bad of heart or dishonest." Her old misgivings about Dave's home influences, revived, had more share in the earnestness of her tone than any misgivings about her daughter. And was not there the awful background of the convict?
"Not a bit of it—not a bit of it! Right as a trivet, I should say, as far as that goes! But.... He stopped and touched his forehead, portentously.
"Ah—the poor soul! Now is that true?"
"I think you may take it of me that is so." The doctor threw his professional manner into this. After a moment he added, as a mere human creature:—"Off her chump! Loose in the top story!" A moment after, for professional reassurance:—"But quite harmless—quite harmless!"
Granny Marrable was grave and oppressed by this news. "The poor old soul!—think of it!" said she. "Oh, but how many's the time I've thanked God in His mercy for sparing me my senses! To think we might any of us be no better off, but for Him, than the man our Lord found naked in the tombs, in the country of the Gadarenes! But she is not bad like that, this Mrs. Prichard?"
"Oh no!—that was a severe case, with complications. Not a legion of devils, this time! One or two little ones. Just simple delusions. Might have yielded to Treatment, taken younger. Too late, now, altogether. Wastage of the brain, no doubt! She's quite happy, you know."
Although Dr. Nash had not shone as a reasoner forming square to resist evidence, he had shrewd compartments in his mind, and in one of them a clear idea that he would do ill to thrust forward the details of the supposed simple delusions. This old lady must not be led to infer that he was interested in them—mere scientific curiosities! She was sure to ask for them in time; he knew that. And it was much better that he should seem to attach no weight whatever to them.