What am I writing?—What am I daring to write?
Physician, heal thyself. And surely that is one of a physician's first duties. A disease struck inwards—the merest tyro knows how fatal is treatment which results in that. It may be I have gone on the wrong track altogether,—at least since my return to England.
The present only is a man's possession: the past is gone out of his hand,—wholly, irrevocably. He may suffer from it, learn from it—in degree, perhaps, expiate it; but to brood over it is utter madness.
Now, I have had many cases of insanity—both physical and moral, so to speak; I call moral insanity that kind of disease which is super-induced on comparatively healthy minds by dwelling incessantly on one idea; the sort of disease which you find in women who have fallen into melancholy from love-disappointments; or in men for overweening ambition, hatred, or egotism—which latter, carried to a high pitch, invariably becomes a kind of insanity. All these forms of monomania, as distinguished from physical mania, disease of the structure of the brain, I have studied with considerable interest and corresponding success. My secret was simple enough; one which Nature herself often tries and rarely fails in—the law of substitution; the slow eradication of any fixed idea, by supplying others, under the influence of which the original idea is, at all events temporarily, laid to sleep.
Why cannot I try this plan? why not do for myself what I have so many times prescribed and done for others?
It was with some notion of the kind that I went to this ball—after getting up a vague sort of curiosity in Treherne's anonymous beauty, about whom he has so long been raving to me—boy-like. Ay, with all his folly, the lad is an honest lad. I should not like him to come to any harm.
The tall one must have been the lady, and the smaller, the plainer, though the pleasanter to my mind, was no doubt her sister. And of course her name too was Johnson.
What a name to startle a man so—to cause him to stand like a fool at that hall-door, with his heart dead still, and all his nerves quivering! To make him now, in the mere writing of it, pause and compel himself into common sense by rational argument—by meeting the thing, be it chimerical or not, face to face, as a man ought to do. Yet as cowardly, in as base a paroxysm of terror, as if likewise face to face, in my hut corner, stood—
Here I stopped. Shortly afterwards I was summoned to the hospital, where I have been ever since. William Carter is dead. He will not want his mother now. What a small matter life or death seems when one comes to think of it. What an easy exchange!