‘Six . . . Sara! We’re going.’

He had no farewell for the doctor. In the reception room, the white-clad secretary said tenderly, ‘It will be one hundred dollars for the consultation, please, and if you don’t mind, with new cases the doctor would prefer cash.’

Fred choked a little before chuckling (and it was his only chuckle of the day), ‘This young lady will pay. She brought the Case here. He can’t. He has a Condition!’

At the lower door of the apartment house, he said, ‘Get this straight, Sara. I don’t blame Janissary. I blame you and whatever you’ve been telling him. You take a taxi. I’m going to walk. And I shan’t see you in New York again. I’m taking the noon train to Sachem . . . Shan’t see you again. No!’

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Last updated Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 11:57

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 34

On the noon train to Sachem there was a celebrated lecturer who beguiled the tedium by analysing the people he saw along the way. He devoted only one glance to Fred Cornplow, sitting in dumpy stiffness in his Pullman chair. There he was, merely a round little man with a round little head and half-round little moustache and round little hands, his fingers tapping with slow regularity on the side of a folded magazine, his glance straight ahead and uncommunicative.

Obviously a petty business man, too unimaginative, too regimented, too incapable of strange sorrows and of fierce achievement, to be worthy the contemplation of a celebrated lecturer who, only eight hours from now, would be explaining to an audience with nice clean shirts and nice earnest smiles that life would be ever so much more amusing if you trained your eyes.

Fred had heard, as something that might happen to people whom you never met, that there had been cases in which entirely sane persons had been forced into private institutions, that were really private insane asylums, by relatives who were grasping or simply stupid. They had been penned in for years, and the more they protested, the more they had been considered dangerous, until they had sunk into the belief that they really were cracked.

He did not know whether these stories were ever true. He did know that Hazel and Annabel, certainly, Dr. Kamerkink and Walter Lindbeck and Lawyer Appletree, probably, would not find anything unsound in his sudden protest at being a combination of mint and treadmill. But he also knew that a whole world of easy-going people can be swayed by such single-track, demanding minds as Sara’s. And he believed, perhaps foolishly, that a week at such a hospital as Janissary’s, with that skilled finger hooking out of him the quirks and crankinesses all of us possess, would really make him unwell. It wouldn’t be anything so melodramatic as padded cells and strait-jackets; it would be just the spying, pitying, incessant care that would turn him feeble-minded.