Ketletas sat up. “I’ll see him tomorrow,” he told himself. Then he lay back, sleep claimed him, and he dreamed of a regenerate Helen living only his behests to obey.
“Dreams are true while they last,” he found himself remarking to Cally when, on the morrow, he at last had speech with him. “What a nuisance it is that we cannot live in dream.”
Cally nodded. Tall, saturnine, remarkably well-dressed, he was seated before an enormous table on which there was nothing but a riding-crop and a cigar box.
The latter he opened. “What’s wrong with you now?”
Ketletas dropped in a chair. “I suppose a chap may tell his physician anything. Mayn’t he?”
“Unfortunately for the physician, most chaps do,” replied Cally who, as he spoke, helped himself to a cigar. “By the way, do you know I have not seen you in the Park lately?”
Ketletas sat back. “Well, latterly, I have taken to riding in the afternoon. I am going today. Will you join me?”
Cally, occupied in lighting the cigar, shook his head. “What have you got up your sleeve?”
Ketletas ran his long thin fingers through his thick bright hair. “It’s about my wife. She don’t care for me and I can’t make her. Last night she made me so furious that I nearly pulled the house down.”
Cally puffed and eyed him. “A very seductive method. Just the way to appeal to a woman, particularly a woman like Mrs. Ketletas.”
“But you don’t realise the confounded injustice of it.”
“Where a woman is concerned I don’t need to. To a woman there is something much superior to justice, and that is pity. Pity she can give. In return what she wants is sympathy and understanding—not an individual who irritates her at every angle of life, and that, I suppose, is what you have been doing.”
Ketletas leaned forward. “Yes, but previously, I—”
Cally waved at him. “Then it was previously that your mistakes began. Given tact, opportunity, propinquity and the desire, and any man, who is a man, can win any woman. These things, all of them, you have, except tact. Try and acquire a little. Meanwhile—”
The physician paused and puffed and threw out: “Mrs. Ketletas, I take it, is entirely convinced that you care for her?”
“Convinced! Why, good Lord! Since I first saw her I have never looked at another woman.”
Cally wreathed himself with smoke. “Then look at one, look hard and see that Mrs. Ketletas sees you at it. In cases of this kind there is nothing like jealousy on the part of the woman, particularly when complicated by indifference on the part of the man. Indifference is very winning. But men generally swear and stamp about. That is so human and therefore so artless that it heightens a lady in her own esteem and fortifies her in her attitude. Yet when the man is serene, smiling and apparently occupied elsewhere, she will say to herself, if not to him: ‘What is the meaning of this?’ And that is the psychological moment. That is the time to walk in.”
“Perhaps,” Ketletas sighed. “But not with a woman like my wife. You don’t know her as I do.”
With magnificent disdain Cally strewed his ashes on the floor. “It may be that I know her better. Mrs. Ketletas is a young and sensitive woman, and a woman who is young and sensitive resembles nothing so much as a violin. In the hands of an artist, a violin becomes a harmonious thing. In the hands of an artisan, it is merely discordant. Necessarily there are violins so wretched that no artist would touch them. But given a Cremona and a virtuoso and what duos the conjunction will produce! A young and sensitive woman is a Cremona in flesh and blood. The harmonies of which she is capable depend on the maestria of the man by whom she is approached. Now fancy yourself a virtuoso and your wife a violin. If you are to make her care for you, you must treat her as an artist should. Have a cigar?”
“But I am not an artist,” the exasperated Ketletas exclaimed. “I am a plain, everyday sort of chap.”
Appreciatively Cally nodded. “Very good then, I’ll sing another tune. Now tell me, when you are not occupied in pulling the house down, do you ever take tea with Mrs. Ketletas? For if so I can give you something to put in her cup—when she is not looking, you know.”
“Rubbish!” Ketletas snorted. “There are no love-philters any more.”
Cally threw away his cigar. “No, but instead there are pathogenic bacilli.”
Ketletas stared.
Again Cally nodded. “Do you happen to count Condillac among your acquaintances?” he asked.
Ketletas shook his head.
“Condillac,” Cally resumed, “was a philosopher. He undertook to analyze the human mind. For the purpose he imagined an adult capable of experiencing every emotion and of appreciating any idea, but having none whatever, and into the mind of this person he proposed to introduce the understanding of things, singly, one after the other. Theoretically the project was luminous. Practically it was impossible. He had no such person to play with. Moreover being, not a scientist, but a philosopher, he could not create one.”
“Well, what of it?” Ketletas, now very bored, inquired.
Cally took from the table the crop and waved it. “What he could not do I can accomplish. With certain bacilli I can give anybody a fever that will empty their mind of everything—temporarily that is, but meanwhile it will be as wax. Wax to receive, marble to retain. Do you get it?”
Ketletas, a bit dazzled, blinked. “I think I am afraid to.”
With a smile, a trifle self-satisfied, Cally shook the crop. “There is nothing to fear, faint heart. Nothing. On the contrary. By means of the bacilli, Mrs. Ketletas’ mind could be made a blank. Then, little by little, her education could proceed. Little by little she would become what you wish. Little by little your ideas,
