“It can't be my fault always that I am forever quarrelling with people—with my own family; with my husband's family; with every one who crosses my path. I tell you they don't understand me, doctor. They don't make allowances for my condition. If they would only make allowances! And they don't give me any consideration. I can't stand it, doctor! I can't go on like this any longer. Please—please, doctor, do something for me!”
Mounting hysteria edged her voice with a sharpened, almost a vulgar shrillness. The austere and studied reserve of her class—a reserve that is part of it poise and the rest of it pose—dropped away from her like a discarded garment, and before her physician she revealed herself nakedly for what she was—a creature with the passions, the forwardness and the selfishness of a spoiled and sickly child; and, on top of these, superimposed and piled up, adult impulses, adult appetites, adult petulance, adult capacity for misery.
“I told you,” he said, “to go away. I thought, until my man brought me your name a bit ago, that you had gone. Weeks ago I told you that travel might help you—not the sort of travel to which you have been used, but a different sort—travel in the quiet places, out of the beaten path, and rest. I told you the same thing again less than a week ago.”
“But where?” she demanded. “Where am I to go? Tell me that! I have been everywhere—I have seen everything. What is there left for me to see in the world? What is there in the world that is worth seeing? You told me before there was nothing organically wrong with me, nothing fundamentally wrong with my body. Then it must be my mind, and travel couldn't cure a mind in the state that mine is in. How can I rest when I am so distracted, when small things upset me so, when——”
In the midst of this new outburst she broke off. Her eyes, wandering from his as she pumped herself up toward a frenzy, were focused now upon some object behind him. She pointed toward it.
“I never saw that before,” she said. “It wasn't there when I was here last.”
He swung about in his chair, its spiral creaking under his weight.
“No,” he said; “you never saw that before. It came into my possession only a day or two ago. It is a——”
She broke in on him.
“What a wonderful face!” she said. “What beauty there is in it—what peace! I think that is what made me notice it—the peace that is in it. Oh, if I could only be like that! Doctor, the being to whom that face belonged must have had everything worth having. And to think there can be such beings in this world—beings so blessed, so happy—while I—I——”