"Nick!" she murmured. "Was it as bad as all that?"
"Bad! Pat, does it mean youcare for me? A little, anyway?"
"A little," she admitted. "Maybe more. Is that what makes you look so forlorn?"
He drew her closer to him. "How could I look forlorn, Honey, when something like this has happened to me? That was just my way of looking happy."
She nestled as closely as the steering wheel permitted, drawing his arm about her shoulders. "I hope you mean that, Nick."
"Then you mean it? You really do?"
"I really do."
"I'm glad," he said huskily. The girl thought she detected a strange dubious note in his voice. She glanced at his face; his eyes were gazing into the dim remoteness of the night horizon.
"Nick," she said, "why were you sowell, so reluctant about admitting this? You must have known Ilike you. I showed you that deliberately in so many ways."
"II wasn't quite sure."
"You were! That isn't it, Nick. I had to practically browbeat you into confessing you cared for me. Why?"
He stepped on the starter; the motor ground into sudden life. The car backed into the road, turning toward Chicago, that glared like a false dawn in the southern sky.
"I hope you never find out," he said.
2
Science of Mind
"She's out," said Pat as the massive form of Dr. Carl Horker loomed in the doorway. "Your treatments must be successful; Mother's out playing bridge."
The Doctor gave his deep, rumbling chuckle. "So much the better, Pat. I don't feel professional anyway." He moved into the living room, depositing his bulk on a groaning davenport. "And how's yourself?"
"Too well to be a patient of yours," retorted the girl. "Psychiatry! The new religion! Just between friends, it's all applesauce, isn't it?"
"If I weren't trying to act in place of your father, I'd resent that, young lady," said the Doctor placidly. "Psychiatry is a definite science, and a pretty important one. Applied psychology, the science of the human mind."
"If said mind exists," added the girl, swinging her slim legs over the arm of a chair.
"Correct," agreed the Doctor. "In my practice I find occasional evidence that it does. Or did; your generation seems to have found substitutes."
"Which appears to work just as well!" laughed Pat. "All our troubles are more or less inherited from your generation."
"Touche!" admitted Dr. Horker. "But my generation also bequeathed you some solid values which you don't know how to use."
"They've been weighed and found wanting," said Pat airily. "We're busy replacing them with our own values."
"Which are certainly no better."
"Maybe not, Doc, but at least they're ours."
"Yours and Tom Paine's. I can't see that you young moderns have brought any new ideas to the social scheme."
"New or not, we're the first ones to give 'em a try-out. Your crowd took it out in talk."
"That's an insult," observed the Doctor cheerfully. "If I weren't acting in loco parentis"
"I know! You'd give me a few licks in the spot popularly supposed to do the most good! Well, that's part of a parent's privilege, isn't it?"
"You've grown beyond the spanking age, my dear. Physically, if not mentallythough I don't say the process would hurt me as much as you. I'd doubtless enjoy it."
"Then you might try sending me to bed without my dinner," the girl laughed.
"That's a doctor's prerogative, Pat. I've even done that to your Mother."
"In other words, you're a complete flop as a parent. All the responsibilities, and none of the privileges."
"That expresses it."
"Well, you elected yourself, Doc. It's not my fault you happened to live next door."
"No. It's my misfortune."
"And I notice," remarked Pat wickedly, "that you're not too thoroughly in loco to neglect sending Mother a bill for services rendered!"
"My dear girl, that's part of the treatment!"
"So? And how?"
"I furnish a bill just steep enough to keep your mother from indulging too frequently in medical services. Without that little practical check on her inclinations, she'd be a confirmed neurotic. One of those sweet, resigned, professional invalids, you know."
"Then why not send her a bill tall enough to cure her altogether?"
"She might change to psychoanalysis or New Thought," chuckled the Doctor. "Besides, your father wanted me to look after her, and besides that, I like having the run of the house."
"Well, I'm sure I don't mind," observed Pat. "We've a dog and a canary bird, too."
"You're in fine fettle this afternoon!" laughed her companion. "Must've been a successful date last night."
"It was." Her eyes turned suddenly dreamy.
"You're in love again, Pat!" he accused.
"Again? Why the 'again'?"
"Well, there was Billy, and that Paul"
"Oh, those!" Her tone was contemptuous. "Merely passing fancies, Doc. Just whims, dreams of the momentin other words, puppy love."
"And this? I suppose this is differenta grand passion?"
"I don't know," she said, frowning abruptly. "He's nice, butodd. Attractive aswell, as the devil."
"Odd? How?"
"Oh, he's one of those minds you think we moderns lack."
"Intellectual, eh? New variety for you; out of the usual run of your dancing collegiates. I've often suspected that you picked your swains by the length and lowness of their cars."
"Maybe I did. That was one of the chief differences between them."
"How'd you meet this mental paragon?"
"Billy Fields dragged him around to one of those literary evenings he affectswhere they read Oscar Wilde and Eugene O'Neil aloud. Bill met him at the library."
"And he out-shone all the local lights, I perceive."
"He surely did!" retorted Pat. "And he hardly said a word the whole evening."
"He wouldn't have to, if they're all like Billy! What's this prodigy's specialty?"
"He writes. I thinklaugh if you want to!I think perhaps he's a genius."
"Well," said Doctor Horker, "even that's possible. It's been known to occur, but rarely, to my knowledge, in your generation."
"Oh, we're just dimmed by the glare of brilliance from yours." She swung her legs to the floor, facing the Doctor. "Do you psychiatrists actually know anything about love?" she queried.
"We're supposed to."
"What is it, then?"
"Just a device of Nature's for perpetuating the species. Some organisms manage without it, and do pretty well."
"Yes. I've heard references to the poor fish!"
"Then they're inaccurate; fish have primitive symptoms of eroticism. But below the vertebrates, notably in the amoeba, I don't recall any amorous habits."
"Then your definition doesn't explain a thing, does it?"
"Not to one of the victims, perhaps."
"Anyway," said Pat decisively, "I've heard of the old biological urge before your kind analysis. It doesn't begin to explain why one should be attracted to this person and repelled by that one. Does it?"
"No, but Freud does. The famous Oedipus Complex."
"That's the love of son for mother, or daughter for father, isn't it? And I don't see how that clears up anything; for example, I can just barely remember my father."
"That's plenty. It could be some little trait in these swains of yours, some unimportant mannerism that recalls that memory. Or there's that portrait of him in the hallthe one under the mellow red light. It might happen that you'd see one of these chaps under a similar light in some attitude that brings the picture to mindor a hundred other possibilities."
"Doesn't sound entirely convincing," objected Pat with a thoughtful frown.