"It's only a post-hypnotic suggestion, that's all. You must defeat it."
Then she literally shook herself free from the obsession. "Oh, why am I tortured and racked so!" she exclaimed. "Can't I be permitted to be myself when I am myself? Isn't it bad enough to be robbed of myself half the time without his imposing his will on me now? Why is he doing this?"
"That's just what I want to find out," I said. "The important thing is not to give in to him. His experiments may possibly be justified, but I don't think so. We certainly have good ground to suspect him. Have you quite got over your desire to telephone?"
"Yes—but it's queer—I can still think of reasons why I might, though of course I agree with you that it's not best to. You see, I've only given up to you instead of to him. I'm quite in the dark, now; I seem to have no will of my own. I can't judge, I can't understand even my own impulses. Well, if I'm blind you and Leah will lead me, won't you?"
She reached over and took Leah's hand affectionately.
When we finished breakfast, Joy and I went into the library. There was an old, gilt-framed, concave mirror there, over the fireplace, that gathered in and focused on its disk the whole room in one condensed, shadowy scene. Joy went up to it.
"Aren't we queer and strange in there?" she said. "It's so dim and ghostly; when I look up and see any one in it, it always seems to me like some scene of Maeterlinck or Sudermann."
She walked over to another glass, more formal and more true, and looked at herself intently.
"Look at the lines about my eyes! They weren't there a year ago! My whole face has changed.... I have grown ten years older this last month.... My eyes themselves are different.... There's another wrinkle.... I wish my eyebrows were even.... I believe my nose is one-sided, too...."
Her voice died away. I looked up and saw her gazing into the mirror with a strange intentness. Her brow was puckered into a frown. Suddenly her hand went to her heart with a gesture of horror.