Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/44

 She seemed, at first, almost rational when she opened her eyes to find him cooking their breakfast of oatmeal and coffee; and she went, at his direction, to wash and dress herself in the bathroom, sanely enough. But her silence when he talked to her was not normal; and whenever he caught her eye it was frightened and wavering, as if she were always on the edge of her obsession; and once, when he touched her hand, in passing her a second cup of coffee, her lips trembled, her teeth chattered, and she began to pant. He pretended not to notice, and the attack passed; but that was the first indication of what afterward became sufficiently plain to him, namely, that her delusion was partly due to what the psychologists would call her "subconscious desire" to have her relations with him the relations of a dog to its master. It was not only the world that she feared; she feared him, too. And he was peculiar enough to be relieved, at last, to find it so. He did not want a woman on his hands. He would have much preferred a dog.

He told her what he was going to do, about renting a small flat; and he set about doing it. He got his money from Chicago without any difficulty, and he found two rooms in a house on One Hundred and Tenth Street (going as far up-town as possible in order to take her away from the scene of her sufferings), and he was able to rent the two rooms for fifteen dollars a month because they were almost uninhabitable. They were in the basement of a