“What is the matter?” she asked, in a startled way. “Did I faint?”
He was conscious that his look must have alarmed her, and he made a desperate effort to speak easily and naturally.
“I guess you came mighty near it,” he answered, as naturally as he could. “It’s all right now.”
For some days nothing unusual happened, so far as Carroll knew. He watched Alice closely, and he plunged into all the literature on the subject of hypnotism upon which he could lay hands. He was not sure that at the end of a week’s hard reading he was much clearer than at the beginning, although he had at least accumulated a fine assortment of terms in the nomenclature of animal magnetism. He cautiously questioned Abby, and learned that for some time Alice had been subject to what the old servant called “notional spells when she were n’t herself.” His friend the specialist was greatly interested in all that Dr. Carroll could tell him about the case.
“It is evidently a subliminal self coming to the surface,” he pronounced. “I’ve seen cases somewhat similar, but only one where the patient was not hypnotized by somebody else.”
“But what can I do about it?” George demanded. “I don’t want any subliminal selves floating about. I want the girl I know.”
“Build up her general health,” the other advised. “You say she’s run down and used up with taking care of her grandmother. Get her rested. That’s the only thing I can say. She is n’t really ill, is she?”
“God knows what you call it,” was Carroll’s response. “She can’t be called well when she goes off the way she did the other day. I tell you it was frightful, simply frightful!”