Free To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey Page A

of being in a room with him that I would get out of being in a room with a famous criminal. Only nicer, of course. But the same feeling of—of wrongness.' She made several furious figures-of-eight. 'If he were to disappear tonight, and someone told me that he was just a beautiful demon and not a human being at all, I would believe them. So help me, I would.'
    Presently she flung the pencil back on to the desk, and said with a little laugh: 'And yet it's all so absurd. You look at him and try to find out what is so extraordinary about him, and what is there? Nothing. Nothing that can't be matched elsewhere, is there? That radiant fairness and that skin like a baby; that Norwegian correspondent of the Clarion that Walter used to bring down had those. He is extraordinarily graceful for a man; but so is Serge Ratoff. He has a nice gentle voice and an engaging drawl; but so have half the inhabitants of Texas and a large part of the population of Ireland. You catalogue his attractions and what do they add up to? I can tell you what they don't add up to. They don't add up to Leslie Searle.'
    'No,' said Liz soberly. 'No. They don't.'
    'The—the exciting thing is left out. What is it that makes him different? Even Emma feels it, you know.'
    'Mother?'
    'Only it takes her the opposite way. She hates it. She quite often disapproves of the people I bring down, sometimes she even dislikes them. But she loathes Leslie Searle.'
    'Has she told you so?'
    'No. She didn't have to.'
    No, thought Liz. She did not have to. Lavinia Fitch—dear, kind, abstracted Lavinia—manufacturer of fiction for the permanently adolescent, had after all a writer's intuition.
    'I wondered for a while if it was that he was a little mad,' Lavinia said.
    'Mad!'
    'Only nor-nor-west, of course. There is an unholy attraction about people who are stark crazy in one direction but quite sane every other way.'
    'Only if you know about their craziness,' Liz pointed out. 'You would have to know about their mental kink before you suffered any unholy attraction.'
    Lavinia considered that. 'Yes, I suppose you are right. But it doesn't matter, because I decided for myself that the "mad" theory didn't work. I have never met anyone saner than Leslie Searle. Have you ?'
    Liz hadn't.
    'You don't think, do you,' Lavinia said, taking to doodling again and avoiding her niece's eye, 'that Walter is beginning to resent Leslie?'
    'Walter,' Liz said, startled. 'No, of course not. They are the greatest friends.'
    Lavinia, having with seven neat strokes erected a house, put the door in it.
    'Why should you think that about Walter?' Liz said, challenging.
    Lavinia added four windows and a chimney-stack, and considered the effect.
    'Because he is so considerate to him.'
    'Considerate! But Walter is always ——'
    'When Walter likes people he takes them for granted,' Lavinia said, making smoke. 'The more he likes them the more he takes them for granted. He even takes you for granted—as you have no doubt observed before now. Until lately he took Leslie Searle for granted. He doesn't any more.'
    Liz considered this in silence.
    'If he didn't like him,' she said at length, 'he wouldn't be doing the Rushmere with him, or the book. Well, would he?' she added, as Lavinia seemed wholly absorbed in the correct placing of a doorknob.
    'The book is going to be very profitable,' Lavinia said, with only a hint of dryness.
    'Walter would never collaborate with someone he didn't like,' Liz said stoutly.
    'And Walter might find it difficult to explain why he didn't want to do the book after all,' Lavinia said as if she had not spoken.
    'Why are you telling me this?' Liz said, half angry.
    Lavinia stopped doodling and said disarmingly: 'Liz darling, I don't quite know, except perhaps that I was hoping you would find some way of reassuring Walter. In your own clever way. Which is to say, without dotting any I's or crossing any T's.' She caught Liz's glance, and said: 'Oh, yes, you are clever. A great deal