He knew that, in a sense, the sending of the diaries did represent a psychological trick. Audrey expected that he would resist reading them. His training, his instincts, his nature, were calculated to make any such intimate process undesirable. She knew, also, that the temptation would obsess him. It would have that effect on anybody. The fact that Jimmie was intellectual and detached, moral in the deepest sense, and also chivalrous, would not diminish his emotional struggle about the matter.
By this strange, unconventional step she had said, Here, read this; this is my history and my confessional; when you have finished with it you can do as you please; but, at least, you will know as much about me and my inward self as I do. She had also, doubtless, filled the books with references to other people—references of a private nature.
That fact weighed heavily against prying into the gilt-edged books. On the other hand, Jimmie could imagine her saying, “Wouldn’t you rather know —than have to guess by interpreting gossip? There’s not a syllable in there about other people that isn’t the common coin of Muskogewan’s underground chatter; it is better to have the unvarnished facts than the heavily painted suspicions.”
She would say that, because that was the sort of girl Audrey was, or thought she was, or pretended to be.
Jimmie couldn’t make up his mind.
One afternoon while he was hard at work Mr. Corinth pushed into his laboratory so abruptly that the door flew back and hit the wall with a crash. The sound, coming in the still concentration of the air-conditioned room, gave Jimmie a monstrous start. The beaker in his hand slipped. He squeezed to recapture it and the pressure of his fingers shot it against an elaboration of glass tubes and fused quartz flasks. There was a shattering tinkle and a greenish brown vapor snaked up from a bubbling leak in the apparatus. The cloud rolled under the hood and out at one side. Jimmie instantly leaped back. He threw a switch that turned up the full suction of the hood. Then he spun around and virtually shoved Mr. Corinth out of the laboratory.
He slammed the door. He was shaking a little.
“It’ll take about an hour,” he said, “to clean the air in there. Even then I’ll have to spray the spot where I was working. That was mighty damned clumsy of me—not to say dangerous!”
“What was it?”
Jimmie chuckled uneasily. He walked close to the old man and separated his eyelids. “Didn’t get a whiff, did you?”