A bright room with a sort of sun-parlour on the south side, a place of wicker furniture and cretonnes, with books and magazines lying about and tobacco on the table. With his eyeglasses and a sober seriousness of face when in repose, the man who received him was hardly distinguishable from a business man of comfortable habit, moderately large affairs, and fairly frequent preoccupations. They shook hands; the specialist offered Mr. Hand a cigarette and took one himself.
“Let’s come out here,” he said, indicating the sun-parlour. “It’s pleasanter and the chairs are better to lounge in.”
They disposed themselves and puffed away for a moment or two.
“I’ve come to see if you can help me,” explained Dick Hand, rather desperately. The other nodded.
“I get fairly sick of—existence,” Dick went on. “I’m restless and rottenly dissatisfied, and I don’t know why. Nothing seems to mean anything. I have these spells, and they are commoner than they used to be.”
“Tell me all about yourself,” suggested the other. “Only what you call to mind and only what you care to tell.”
Dick hesitated. “I thought,” he said, “that you people asked questions—to get at certain things hidden from us of whom you ask them.”
“Well, we do that,” admitted the specialist. “But it usually is better to hear a man’s own story first. After we have got the things a man readily recalls, comes the problem of getting at the things he doesn’t recall.”
“I suppose the idea is the relief afforded by making a clean breast of things,” hazarded Dick.
“Not entirely. It goes beyond that. It aims at relieving unsuspected pressures. There’s a sort of an analogy in a physical injury, such as a fracture. The man who has the fracture knows that something is wrong, he suffers intense pain, but he doesn’t know that a bone is broken, or, if he does, he doesn’t know just where, nor how to set it. And he suffers too much to be able to find out.”