“Is that all?” I asked. “Haven’t you got cloven hoofs? All right. Say these things are as peculiar as you seem to think they are. What of it? Your stepmother was a Dain, and she was poison, but where were her physical marks of degeneracy? Wasn’t she as normal, as wholesome-looking as any woman you’re likely to find?”
“But that’s no answer.” She shook her head impatiently. “She didn’t have the physical marks perhaps. I have, and the mental ones too. I—” She sat down on the side of the bed close to me, elbows on knees, tortured white face between hands. “I’ve not ever been able to think clearly, as other people do, even the simplest thoughts. Everything is always so confused in my mind. No matter what I try to think about, there’s a fog that gets between me and it, and other thoughts get between us, so I barely catch a glimpse of the thought I want before I lose it again, and have to hunt through the fog, and at last find it, only to have the same thing happen again and again and again. Can you understand how horrible that can become: going through life like that—year after year—knowing you will always be like that—or worse?”
“I can’t,” I said. “It sounds normal as hell to me. Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they’re arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you’ve got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place.”
She took her face out of her hands and smiled shyly at me, saying:
“It’s funny I didn’t like you before.” Her face became serious again. “But—”
“But nothing,” I said. “You’re old enough to know that everybody except very crazy people and very stupid people suspect themselves now and then—or whenever they happen to think about it—of not being exactly sane. Evidence of goofiness is easily found: the more you dig into yourself, the more you turn up. Nobody’s mind could stand the sort of examination you’ve been giving yours. Going around trying to prove yourself cuckoo! It’s a wonder you haven’t driven yourself nuts.”
“Perhaps I have.”
“No. Take my word for it, you’re sane. Or don’t take my word for it. Look. You got a hell of a start in life. You got into bad hands at the very beginning. Your stepmother was plain poison, and did her best to ruin you, and in the end succeeded in convincing you that you were smeared with a very special family curse. In the past couple of months—the time I’ve known you—all the calamities known to man have been piled up on you, and your belief in your curse has made you hold yourself responsible for every item in the pile. All right. How’s it affected you? You’ve been dazed a lot of the time, hysterical part of the time, and when your husband was killed you tried to kill yourself, but weren’t unbalanced enough to face the shock of the bullet tearing through your flesh.
“Well, good God, sister! I’m only a hired man with only a hired man’s interest in your troubles, and some of them have had me groggy. Didn’t I try to bite a ghost back in that Temple? And I’m supposed to be old and toughened to crime. This morning—after all you’d been through—somebody touches off a package of nitroglycerine almost beside your bed. Here you are this evening, up and dressed, arguing with me about your sanity.
“If you aren’t normal, it’s because you’re tougher, saner, cooler than normal. Stop thinking about your Dain blood and think about the Mayenne blood in you. Where do you suppose you got your toughness, except from him? It’s the same toughness that carried him through Devil’s Island, Central America, and Mexico, and kept him standing up till the end. You’re more like him than like the one Dain I saw. Physically, you take after your father, and if you’ve got any physical marks of degeneracy—whatever that means—you got them from him.”
She seemed to like that. Her eyes were almost happy. But I had talked myself out of words for the moment, and while I was hunting for more behind a cigarette the shine went out of her eyes.
“I’m glad—I’m grateful to you for what you’ve said, if you’ve meant it.” Hopelessness was in her tone again, and her face was back between her hands. “But, whatever I am, she was right. You can’t say she wasn’t. You can’t deny that my life has been cursed, blackened, and the lives of everyone who’s touched me.”
“I’m one answer to that,” I said. “I’ve been around you a lot recently, and I’ve mixed into your affairs enough, and nothing’s happened to me that a night’s sleep wouldn’t fix up.”
“But in a different way,” she protested slowly, wrinkling her forehead. “There’s no personal relationship with you. It’s professional with you—your work. That makes a difference.”
I laughed and said:
“That won’t do. There’s Fitzstephan. He knew your family, of course, but he was here through me, on my account, and was actually, then, a step further removed from you than I. Why shouldn’t I have gone down first? Maybe the bomb was meant for me? Maybe. But that brings us to a human mind behind it—one that can bungle—and not your infallible curse.”
“You are mistaken,” she said, staring at her knees. “Owen loved me.”
I decided not to appear surprised. I asked:
“Had you—?”
“No, please! Please don’t ask me to talk about it. Not now—after what happened this morning.” She jerked
