"It's a form of aberration—most interesting. You have heard of double personalities, of which a great deal of nonsense has been written? Well, Lethmann's disease is just this: a man, say, of twenty, suddenly checked in the course of his youth, becomes practically another person. You, for instance, became, or fancied you became, another person; you suddenly 'checked yourself and became sensible,' as you put it, but you did not destroy that old foolish self. Nothing is destructible in mind as long as the brain-tissue is normal; you put it in prison, and after the lapse of many years, owing, perhaps, to some slight declension in brain power, it broke out, dominated you, and lived again. Youth must be served.
"It would have been perhaps better for you to have let your youth run its course and expend itself normally. You have paid the price of your own will-power. I am very much interested in this. Tell me as faithfully as you can what you did in Paris, or at least what you gathered that you did. When you came to, did you remember your actions during the month of aberration?"
"When I came to," said Simon, speaking almost with his teeth set, "I was like a person stunned. Then I remembered, bit by bit, what I had been doing, but it was like vaguely remembering what another man had been doing."
"Right," said Oppenshaw, "that tallies with your case. Go on."
"I had been doing foolish things. I had been living, so to say, on the surface of life, without a thought of anything but pleasure, without the slightest recollection of myself as I am. I had been doing things that I might have done at twenty—extravagant follies; yet I believe not any really vicious acts. I had been drinking too much champagne, for one thing, and there were several ladies.... Good Lord! Oppenshaw, I'd blush to confess it to anyone else, but I'd been going on like a boy, picking flowers at Fontainebleau—writing verses to one of these hussies. I could remember that. Me!—verses about blue skies and streams and things! Me! It's horrible!"
"Used you to write verses when you were young?"
"Yes," said Simon, "I believe I used to make that sort of fool of myself."
"You were full of the joy of living?"
"I suppose so."
"You see, everything tallies. Yes, without any manner of doubt it's a case of Lethmann's disease rounded and complete. Now, tell me, when you came to, you could remember all your actions in Paris; how far back did that memory go?"