t see how W. O. could go on six months longer. But he’s fooled us all—you, me, the doctors at Johns Hopkins, everyone who’s had anything to do with the case. The man is dying from malignant carcinoma—he has been dying for years—his life is hanging by a thread and the thread may break at any time—but when it is going to break I have no way of telling you.”
“Ah-hah,” she said reflectively. Her eyes had taken on a dull appeased look as he talked to her, and now she had begun to pluck at her large cleft chin. “Then you think—” she began.
“I think nothing,” he shouted. “And for God’s sake stop picking at your chin!”
For a moment he felt the sudden brutal anger that one sometimes feels toward a contrary child. He felt like taking her by the shoulders and shaking her. Instead, he took it out in words and, scowling at her, said with brutal directness:
“Look here!… You’ve got to pull yourself together. You’re becoming a mental case—do you hear me? You wander around like a person in a dream, you ask questions no one can answer, you demand answers no one can give—you work yourself up into hysterical frenzies and then you collapse and soak yourself with drugs, patent medicines, corn-licker—anything that has alcohol in it—for days at a time. When you go to bed at night you think you hear voices talking to you, someone coming up the steps, the telephone. And really you hear nothing: there is nothing there. Do you know what that is?” he demanded brutally. “Those are symptoms of insanity—you’re becoming unbalanced; if it keeps on they may have to send you to the crazy-house to take the cure.”
“Ah-hah! Uh-huh!” she kept plucking at her big chin with an air of abstracted reflection and with a curious look of dull appeasement in her eyes as if his brutal words had really given her some comfort. Then she suddenly came to herself, looked at him with clear eyes, and her generous mouth touched at the corners with the big lewd tracery of her earthy humour, she sniggered hoarsely, and prodding him in his fat ribs with a big bony finger, she said:
“You think I’ve got’em, do you? Well—” she nodded seriously in agreement, frowning a little as she spoke, but with the faint grin still legible around the corners of her mouth, —“I’ve often thought the same thing. You may be right,” she nodded seriously again. “There are times when I do feel off—you know?—queer—looney—crazy—like there
