“You like the eatments?” He indicated the colorful dishes on the coffee table.
“Delicious, and simply lovely to look at. But—”
“It’s like that. This isn’t food for hungry people. Canapes like these are carefully designed to appeal to all five senses—if you delight in the crunch of good zwieback the way I do, and include hearing.”
She stared at him. “I think I’m being likened to a… a smorgasbord!”
He laughed. “The point I’m making is that a hungry man will go for this kind of food as happily as any other. The important thing to him is that it’s food. If he happens to like the particular titillations offered by such food as this, he will probably look back on his gobbling with some regret, later, when his appetite for food is satisfied and his psychic—artistic, if you like—hungers can be felt.” Robin grinned suddenly. “This is a wayward and wandering analogy, I know; but it does express why I kept away from you.”
“It does?”
“Yes, of course. Look, Peg, I can see what’s happening to me even if I am the patient. I wonder why so many doctors overlook that? You can play around with my metabolism and my psychology and ultimately affect such an abstract as my emotional maturity. But there’s one thing you can’t touch—and that is my own estimate of the things I have learned. My sense of values. You can change my approach to these things, but not the things themselves. One such thing is that I have a violent reaction against sordidness, no matter how well justified the sordidness may have been when I did the sordid thing, whatever it was. In the past, the justification has been the important thing. Now—and by ‘now’ I mean since I started these treatments—the reaction is more important. So I avoid sordidness because I don’t want to live through the reaction afterward, and not so much because I dislike doing a sordid thing.”
“That’s a symptom of maturity,” said Peg. “But what has it to do with me?”
“I was hungry,” he said simply. “So hungry I couldn’t see straight. And suddenly so full of horse sense that I wouldn’t reach for the pretty canapes until I could fully appreciate them. And now—sit down, Peg!”
“I… have to go,” she said in a throttled voice.
“Oh, you’re wrong,” he said, not moving. He spoke very quietly. “You don’t have to go. You haven’t been listening to me. You’re acting defensive when I’ve laid no siege. I have just said that I’m incapable of doing anything in bad taste—that is, anything which will taste bad to me, now or later. And you are acting as if I had said the opposite. You are thinking with your emotions instead of your intellect.”
Slowly, she sank back into her chair. “You take a great deal for granted,” she said coldly.
“That, in effect, is what the bread and cheese and pimentos and olives told me when I told them about these trays,” he said. “Oh, Peg, let’s not quarrel. You know that all I’ve just said is true. I could candy-coat all my phrases, talk for twice as long, and say half as much; and if I did you’d resent it later; you know you would.”
“I rather resent it now.”
“Not really.” He met her gaze, and held it until she began to smile.
“Robin, you’re impossible!”
“Not impossible. Just highly unlikely.”
He sprang to pour coffee for her—and how did he know that she preferred coffee to tea? he had both—and he said, “Now we can talk about the other thing that’s bothering me. Mel.”
“What about Mel?” she said sharply.
He smiled at her tone. “I gather that it’s the other thing that’s been bothering you?”
She almost swore at him.
“Sorry,” he said with his quick grin, and was as quickly sober. “Warfield’s very much in love with you, Peg.”
“He—has said so.”
“Not to me,” said Robin. “I’m not intimating that he has poured out his soul to me. But he can’t conceal it. What he mostly does is avoid talking about you. Under the circumstances, that begins to be repetitious and—significant.” He shrugged. “Thing is, I have found myself a little worried from time to time. About myself.”
“Since when did you start worrying about yourself?”
“Perhaps it’s symptomatic. This induced maturity that I am beginning to be inflicted with has made me think carefully about a lot of things I used to pass off without a thought. No one can escape the basic urgencies of life—hunger, self-preservation, and so on. At my flightiest moments I was never completely unaware of hunger. The difference between a childish and a mature approach to such a basic seems to be that the child is preoccupied only with an immediate hunger. The adult directs most of his activities to overcoming tomorrow’s hunger.
“Self-preservation is another basic that used to worry me not at all as long as danger was invisible. I’d dodge an approaching taxi, but not an approaching winter. Along comes a few gland-treatments, and I find myself feeling dangers, not emotionally, and now, but intellectually, and in the future.”
“A healthy sign,” nodded Peg.
“Perhaps so. Although that intellectual realization is a handy thing to have around to ward off personal catastrophies, it is also the raw material for an anxiety neurosis. I don’t think Mel Warfield is trying to kill me, but I think he has reason enough to.”
“What?” Peg said, horrified.
“Certainly. He loves you. You—” he broke off, and smiled engagingly. She felt her color rising, as she watched his bright eyes, the round bland oval of his almost chinless face.
“Don’t say it, Robin,” she breathed.
“—you won’t marry him,” Robin finished easily. “Whom you love needn’t enter into the conversation.” He laughed. “What amounts of wind we use to avoid the utterance of a couple of syllables! Anyway, let it suffice that Mel, for his own reasons, regards me as a rival, or at least as a stumbling block.” His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I gather that he has also concluded that your chief objection to me has been my… ah… immaturity. No, Peg, don’t bother to answer. So if I am right—and I think I am—he has been put in the unenviable position of working like fury to remove his chief rival’s greatest drawback. His only drawback, if you’ll forgive the phrase, ma’am,” he added, with a twinkle and the tip of an imaginary hat. “No fun for him. And I don’t think that Brother Mel is so constituted that he can get any pleasure out of the great sacrifice act.”
“I think you’re making a mountain out of—”
“Peg, Peg, certainly you know enough about psychology to realize that I am not accusing Mel of being a potential murderer, or even of consciously wanting to hurt me. But the compulsions of the subconscious are not civilized. Your barely expressed annoyance at the man who jostles you in a crowded bus is the civilized outlet to an impulse for raw murder. Your conditioned reflexes keep you from transfixing him with the nearest nail file; but what about the impulses of a man engaged in the subtle complexities of a thing like the glandular overhaul I’m getting? In the bus, your factor of safety with your reactions can run from no visible reaction through a lifted eyebrow to an acid comment, before you reach the point where you give him a light tap on the noggin and actually do damage. Whereas Mel’s little old subconscious just has to cause his hand to slip while doing a subcutaneous, or to cause his eye to misread a figure on the milligram scale, for me to be disposed of in any several of many horrible ways. Peg! What’s the matter?”
Her voice quivering, she said quietly, “That is the most disgusting, conceited, cowardly drivel I have ever had to listen to. Mel Warfield may have the misfortune to be human, but he is one of the finest humans I have ever met. As a scientist, there is no one in this country—probably in the world—more skilled than he. He is also a gentleman, in the good old-fashioned meaning of the word—I will say it, no matter how much adolescent sneering you choose to do—and if he is engaged on a case, the case comes first.” She rose. “Robin, I have had to take a lot from you, because as a gland specialist I knew what an advanced condition I had to allow for. That is going, to stop. You are going to find out that one of the prices you must pay for the privilege of becoming an adult is the control of the noises your mouth makes.”