"I read about it," said Simon. He tried to give a picture of the symptoms and failed to convince, but he managed to irritate. The semi-royal one listened with a specious appearance of attention and even interest; then, the other having finished, he opened his batteries.
Simon left the Club with the feeling that he had been put upon the stand beside charlatans, quacks, and the purveyor of crank theories; also that he had been snubbed.
CHAPTER VI TIDD AND RENSHAW
Did he mind? Not a bit; he enjoyed it.
If Sir Ralph had kicked him out of the Athenæum for airing false science there he would have enjoyed it. He would have enjoyed anything casting odium and discredit on the theory of double personality in the form of Lethmann's disease.
For now his hunted soul, that had taken momentary refuge in the thought of nursing homes and restraint, had left that burrow and was taking refuge in doubt.
The whole thing was surely absurd. The affair of last year must have been a temporary aberration due to overwork, despite the fact that he had, indeed, drawn another ten thousand unconsciously from the bank; it was patently foolish to think that a man could be under the dominion of a story-book disease. He had read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—that wild fiction! Why, if this thing were true, it would be a fiction just as wild. Oceans of comfort suddenly came to him. It gave him a new grip on the situation, pointing out that the whole of this business as suggested by Oppenshaw was on a level with a "silly sensational story," that is to say with the impossible—therefore impossible.
He made one grave mistake—the mistake of reckoning Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a "silly sensational story."