“You sure do go in for weirdies, Fabe. For a superficially well-adjusted, well-organized guy with a real talent for the mundane things of life, you pick the damndest women I ever heard of. But that’s your business. Maybe it’s your way of adding a necessary pinch of the exotic to the grim daily round. Or maybe you’re making up for the drabness of your father’s grocery store.”

“This girl is not a weirdie,” Fabian insisted angrily. “She’s a very simple little secretary, prettier than most, but that’s about all.”

“Have it your own way. To me, she’s a weirdie. To me, there’s not a hell of a lot of difference—from your description—between her and that crazy White Russian dame you were running around with back in our junior year. You know the one I mean—what was her name?”

“Sandra? Oh, Jim, what’s the matter with you? Sandra was a bollixed-up box of dynamite who was always blowing up in my face. This kid turns pale and dies if I so much as raise my voice. Besides, I had a real puppy-love crush on Sandra; this other girl is somebody I just met, like I told you, and I don’t feel anything for her, one way or the other.”

The young doctor grinned. “So you come up to my office and have a consultation about her! Well, it’s your funeral. What do you want to know?”

“What causes all these—these physical peculiarities?”

Dr. Rudd got up and sat on the edge of his desk. “First,” he said, “whether you want to recognize it or not, she’s a highly disturbed person. The hysterics in the restaurant point to it, and the fantastic nonsense she told you about her body points to it. So right there, you have something. If only one percent of what she told you is true—and even that I would say is pretty high—it makes sense in terms of psychosomatic imbalance. Medicine doesn’t yet know quite how it works, but one thing seems certain: anyone badly mixed up mentally is going to be at least a little mixed up physically, too.”