"Enoch, you have made me love you and then have told me that
you cannot marry me. I think that I have the right to tell you that
you are abnormal toward marriage. You are spoiling our two lives and I
am entering a most solemn protest against your doing so."
"But, Diana--" began Enoch.
"No!" interrupted Diana. "You must hear me through in silence, Enoch.
I remember my father telling me that Seaton believed that you had been
made the victim of almost hypnotic suggestion by that beast, Luigi.
Not that Luigi knew anything about auto-suggestion or anything of the
sort! He simply wanted to enslave a boy who was a clever gambler. And
so he planted the vicious suggestion in your mind that you were
necessarily bad because your mother was. And all these years, that
suggestion has held, not to make you bad but to make you fear that your
children would be or that disease, mental or physical, is latent in you
which marriage would uncover. Enoch, have you never talked your case
over with a psychologist?"
"No!" replied Enoch. "I've always felt that I was perfectly normal and
I still feel so. Moreover, I've wanted to bury my mother's history a
thousand fathoms deep. Consider too, that I've never wanted to marry
any woman till I met you.
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