“I never heard of anything of the kind in Ormond’s history,” said Wanhope, tolerant of the incursion.
Minver took his cigar out to ask, the more impressively, perhaps, “What do you fellows make of the terror that a two months’ babe starts in its sleep with before it can have any notion of what fear is on its own hook?”
“We don’t make anything of it,” the psychologist answered. “Perhaps the pathologists do.”
“Oh, it’s easy enough to say wind,” Rulledge indignantly protested.
“Too easy, I agree with you,” Wanhope consented. “We cannot tell what influences reach us from our environment, or what our environment really is, or how much or little we mean by the word. The sense of danger seems to be inborn, and possibly it is a survival of our race life when it was wholly animal and took care of itself through what we used to call the instincts. But, as I was saying, it was not danger that Ormond seemed to be afraid of, if it came short of death. He was almost abnormally indifferent to pain. I knew of his undergoing an operation that most people would take ether for, and not wincing, because it was not supposed to involve a fatal result.
“Perhaps he carried his own anodyne with him,” said Minver, “like the Chinese.”
“You mean a sort of self-anaesthesia?” Wanhope asked. “That is very interesting. How far such a principle, if there is one, can be carried in practice. The hypnotists--”
“I’m afraid I didn’t mean anything so serious or scientific,” said the painter.
“Then don’t switch Wanhope off on a side track,” Rulledge implored. “You know how hard it is to keep him on the main line. He’s got a mind that splays all over the place if you give him the least chance. Now, Wanhope, come down to business.”
Wanhope laughed amiably. “Why, there’s so very little of the business. I’m not sure that it wasn’t Mrs. Ormond’s attitude toward the fact that interested me most. It was nothing short of devout. She was a convert. She believed he really saw--I suppose,” he turned to me, “there’s no harm in our recognizing now that they didn’t always get on smoothly together?”