“Can you deal with our trouble, doctor?” I cried out.
“Deal with it, my dear madam? Of course I can. Your Dorothy is a good girl, and will yield herself to treatment. As to that, you don’t want me. The doctor is only useful on the principle that lookers on see most of the game. Once understand the thing, and it is with you the cure must lie.”
“Please explain; you will find me very obedient.”
“I’m not so sure of that; you know the whole of my mental property has not been gathered in this right little, tight little island. You ladies look very meek; but directly one begins to air one’s theories—which are not theories, by the way, but fixed principles of belief and conduct—you scent all manner of heterodoxy, and because a valuable line of scientific thought and discovery is new to you, you take up arms, with the notion that it flies in the face of the Bible. When, as a matter of fact, every new advance in science is a further revelation, growing out, naturally, from that we already have.”
“Try me, doctor; your ’doxy shall be my ’doxy if you will only take us in hand, and I shall be ready enough to believe that your science is by revelation.”
“Well, here goes. In for a penny, in for a pound. In the first place, I want to do away with the sense of moral responsibility, both for yourself and Dorothy, which is wearing you out. Or, rather, I want to circumscribe its area and intensify its force. Dorothy has, perhaps, and conceivably her mother has also, inherited her peculiar temperament; but you are not immediately responsible for that. She, again, has fostered this inherited trait, but neither is she immediately responsible for the fact.”
“How do you mean, doctor? That we can’t help it, and must take our nature as we find it? But that is worse than ever. No; I cannot believe it. Certainly my husband has done a great deal to cure me.”
“No doubt he has. And how he has done it, without intention, I dare say, I hope by-and-by to show you. Perhaps you now and then remark, What creatures of habit we are!”
“And what of that? No one can help being struck now and then with the fact; especially, no mother.”
“Well, and what does this force of habit amount to? and how do you account for it?”